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- It was every little girl’s dream - she was to get a new dress, jewellery, sweets and a party for all her friends.
What 10-year-old Aisha* did not know was that after the wedding party she would have to leave school, move to a village far from her parents’ home, cook and clean all day, and have sex with her older husband.
“He took out a special sheet and laid me down on it,” Aisha told IRIN, wringing her small plump hands. “After it, I started bleeding. It was so painful that I was crying and shouting, and since then I have seen him as death.”
After a week of fighting off her husband every night, Aisha’s father was called. He had received 200,000 Yemeni Rial (US$1,000) for his daughter in `shart’, a Yemeni dowry, which he could not pay back.
A bill passed in parliament in February 2009 setting the minimum age for marriage at 17 was rejected by the Islamic Sharia Codification Committee which said it was un-Islamic, according to local women’s rights organizations.
So, for now, there is no law protecting children against early marriages in Yemen.
”I don’t call it marriage, but rape,” said Shada Mohammed Nasser, a lawyer at the High Court in Sanaa. She has represented several child bride divorce cases in court, but admits she has lost most of them. Only a handful of child brides have successfully managed to divorce their husbands.
“The law on marriage stipulates that a girl should not sleep with her husband until she is mature,” said Nasser, which according to the law is the age of 15. “But the law is not enforced.”
A girl can be married at just nine, but cannot legally seek a divorce until she is 15 or older. The money paid by the husband for his “wife” is a further obstacle to divorce, while the case can only be heard in a court in the governorate where the marriage took place.
“Usually the marriage will have been signed in the husband’s governorate and the judges may look more favourably on their own kinsmen,” said Nasser. “Many judges are governed by arcane views on women.”
Just under half of Yemeni girls, 48 percent, are married before they turn 18, according to the Washington DC-based International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW). This is classified as underage, according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
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Its not Just the Middle east:
ReplyDeleteFrom Al Arabiya:
Two Malaysian girls aged 10 and 11 who were wed to middle-aged men have been separated from their husbands as their cases are investigated, religious officials said Monday.
The girls were married off last month by their fathers, who said they were following religious edicts, said deputy head of northern Kelantan state's religious department Mohamad Abdul Aziz Mohammad Noor.
He said Samsudin Ajaib, who is also being investigated on suspicion of leading a religious cult, married 11-year-old Siti Nur Zubaidah and also gave away his 10-year-old daughter to a family friend.
"Both girls have now been separated from their husbands," Mohamad Abdul Aziz told AFP.
He said that a religious Sharia court had separated Samsudin's daughter from her husband while Siti's father had applied to the court to annul her marriage.
Islamic law (Sharia) runs in parallel with civil law in predominantly Muslim Malaysia and Kelantan state allows under-age marriages if religious officials give permission.
Siti's mother told the Star daily that shortly after the marriage, her daughter was found outside a mosque in the nation's capital and was now being treated in hospital.
She would not comment on whether the marriage was consummated, but said her daughter was in a state of shock and traumatised by the events.
Women, family and community development minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil urged action against Samsudin and the religious sect, saying it promised "heavenly rewards" for child marriages, the New Straits Times reported.