The secret world of child brides

[demosincebirth]

By Cynthia Gorney




Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows. They squatted side by side on the dirt, a crowd of village women holding sari cloth around them as a makeshift curtain, and poured soapy water from a metal pan over their heads. Two of the brides, the sisters Radha and Gora, were 15 and 13, old enough to understand what was happening. The third, their niece Rajani, was 5. She wore a pink T-shirt with a butterfly design on the shoulder. A grown-up helped her pull it off to bathe.

The grooms were en route from their own village, many miles away. No one could afford an elephant or the lavishly saddled horses that would have been ceremonially correct for the grooms' entrance to the wedding, so they were coming by car and were expected to arrive high-spirited and drunk. The only local person to have met the grooms was the father of the two oldest girls, a slender gray-haired farmer with a straight back and a drooping mustache. This farmer, whom I will call Mr. M, was both proud and wary as he surveyed guests funneling up the rocky path toward the bright silks draped over poles for shade; he knew that if a nonbribable police officer found out what was under way, the wedding might be interrupted mid-ceremony, bringing criminal arrests and lingering shame to his family.

It's a long read.

As a father myself of four girls, I had a hard time with my anger at the parents (fathers) of those child brides. Just sickning.


more: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/child-brides/gorney-text

[lapislzi]

1. This needs a kick

We know so little.

[Samantha]

2. Just when you think you can't find out anything more shocking

than what has been uncovered in recent years, THIS. Unbelievably sad.

Sam

[polly7]

3. K & R n/t.

[al bupp]

4. I hate bronze age "traditions" such as this /nt

[lbrtbell]

5. So do I! - n/t

[snagglepuss]

6. "If there were any danger in early marriage, Allah would have forbidden it,"

That says it all , doesn't it? That brilliant observation made by a Yemani memeber of parliment.


snip

Yemeni member of parliament named Mohammed Al-Hamzi told me in the capital city of Sanaa one day. "Something that Allah himself did not forbid, we cannot forbid." Al-Hamzi, a religious conservative, is vigorously opposed to the legislative efforts in Yemen to prohibit marriage for girls below a certain age (17, in a recent version), and so far those efforts have met with failure. Islam does not permit marital relations before a girl is physically ready, he said, but the Holy Koran contains no specific age restrictions and so these matters are properly the province of family and religious guidance, not national law. Besides, there is the matter of the Prophet Muhammad's beloved Ayesha—nine years old, according to the conventional account, when the marriage was consummated.