Inside the secret world of child brides
Posted by staff / June 2, 2011
It’s officially condemned, but culturally condoned in many countries around the world, even in the 21st century. Surprisingly, the pressure to marry underage girls often comes from the bride’s family, rather than from the groom. Why should this be? As Cynthia Gorney explains in “Too Young to Wed: Inside the Secret World of Child Brides” in the June issue of National Geographic, the alternatives are considered worse:
“Forced early marriage thrives to this day in many regions of the world—arranged by parents for their own children, often in defiance of national laws, and understood by whole communities as an appropriate way for a young woman to grow up when the alternatives, especially if they carry a risk of her losing her virginity to someone besides her husband, are unacceptable.
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…”
In the photo above, a 14-year-old mother with a 2-year-old daughter washes her newborn.
Full story at National Geographic
Photo by Stephanie Sinclair, National Geographic
Comments are off for this post.