The Secret World of Child Brides (National Geographic)
Child marriage spans continents, language, religion, caste. In India the girls will typically be attached to boys four or five years older; in Yemen, Afghanistan, and other countries with high early marriage rates, the husbands may be young men or middle-aged widowers or abductors who rape first and claim their victims as wives afterward, as is the practice in certain regions of Ethiopia. Some of these marriages are business transactions, barely adorned with additional rationale: a debt cleared in exchange for an 8-year-old bride; a family feud resolved by the delivery of a virginal 12-year-old cousin. Those, when they happen to surface publicly, make for clear and outrage-inducing news fodder from great distances away. The 2008 drama of Nujood Ali, the 10-year-old Yemeni girl who found her way alone to an urban courthouse to request a divorce from the man in his 30s her father had forced her to marry, generated worldwide headlines and more recently a book, translated into 30 languages: I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.
Photographer Stephanie Sinclair has a slideshow of these young girls.
You can pick up a copy of “I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced” at Amazon.
I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced
Despite Progress, Child Marriage Continues to Flourish, by Mandy Major
Ever since child bride Nujood Ali stormed into a Yemeni courthouse and fiercely demanded a divorce from her middle-aged husband, the issue of child marriage has been well documented. However, while Ali was granted her divorce, and became a prominent figure via her 2010 memoir, I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, thousands of girls continue to be the victims of this savage practice.
Although child marriage is defined as marriage before 18, a vast number of girls—born into poor, rural areas spanning from Nigeria to India—are much, much younger. The grim plight of these girls is detailed in Cynthia Gorney’s “Too Young to Wed: The Secret World of Child Brides,” in this month’s issue of National Geographic. At once heartbreaking, illuminating and enraging, the article shows that no convenient solution is available for such a complex issue deeply rooted in cultural customs.