If you noticed the irony of the title of this posting then you understand the depth of my disgust with this headline. In Yemen an eight year old child bride died on her wedding night of “sexual trauma” (actually it was internal bleeding-not an unusual fate for Yemeni child brides), according to Lebanese news outlet Al Nahar. If you are disgusted by that then you will really be ready to lose your breakfast over this next bit of information-her husband was a man of 40. Yes, that is right her parents saw fit to marry their eight year old daughter to a man five times her age.

What makes it worse is that this is not an unusual practice across the world. According to a 54 page report by Human Rights Watch on the topic of child brides girls who are subjected to forced marriages are the victims of sexual and domestic abuse, the lucky ones living in what constitutes servitude. The United Nations (UN) has postulated that between 2011 and 2020 140 million girls around the world will be victimized in this manner being forced to marry before they are 18, with 50 million of those girls being under the age of 15.  The plight of these children is so shocking that when an 11 year old Yemeni girl made a video expressing her outrage at her parents decision to marry her off to a much older man, it went viral. That girl, Nada al Ahdal, was lucky since she had an uncle who rescued her from her parents.

Why don’t they just set a minimum age? Well the government of Yemen tried that when they passed a law in February 2009 declaring 17 the minimum age for marriage. Unfortunately Islamic hardliners declared that law “un-islamic” therefore rendering it null and void in the Islamic nation. The government of Saudi Arabia decided to declare a minimum age for marriage after a surge of child marriages over the summer of 2011. In April of 2012, the Saudi Arabian government offered a draft law that would raise the minimum age for marriage to 16. However the law was riddled with loopholes, thus offering the female children of Saudi Arabia no real protection.

Why is this an issue? The problem is best described in an article from Joel Brinkley of the Chicago Tribune in May of this year:

“Finally, after so many years of fatuous promises, in April the Justice Ministry offered a draft regulation that would set 16 as the minimum age. This draft is riven with loopholes, however, including a provision that would allow the father to override the law under certain circumstances — even though fathers are usually the villains in these stories. They’re usually the ones who “sell” their preteen daughters to wealthy older men in exchange for a large dowry. The draft law also does not set out any penalties for violators.”

So you see it isn’t just the families, who are selling their daughters to wealthy pedophiles, who are failing these children, it is the governments in the Islamic world that are allowing this continued exploitation to take place. After all how can a government based on a religion whose own founder married a six year old girl , and consummated that marriage with her when she was 9 years old, stop others from doing the same? It is also the NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) who are accepting these pathetic attempts by the governments across the Middle East and northern Africa who are failing these girls, as illustrated by the Brinkley article:

“Even some of the human-rights groups that lobbied hard for the new law recognize the problems. Equality Now, one of the key NGOs behind this campaign to end child marriage, remarked that “while these exemptions to the minimum age of marriage … are still worrisome, it does indicate a step forward in offering protection to girls.”

All this brings me to the following conclusion-even though Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran and many other nations across the Islamic world have signed the UN’s Convention of the Rights of the Child girls in these nations will continue to be sold by their parents into sexual slavery until the citizens of their own nations stand up and say “NO” to child marriage.