f.a.y.z.a

Fayza, 25, is a university student from Yemen. She was forced to drop out of school when she was made to marry at the age of eight. That marriage ended in divorce a year later. At 14, she became the third wife of a 60-year-old man. After bearing three children, she divorced again at the age of 18. Fayza is now only allowed to see her children every other weekend. Her older sister persuaded her to finish her education, arguing that this would be her only way to improve her life. Despite her poverty, her lowly social status as a divorced woman in an ultra-conservative society, and her parents’ opposition to her plans to go back to school, Fayza is now in her first year of business studies at university (with a help from a grant from an NGO called YERO). For her, education is not the goal, but simply a means to achieve her goals. Her dream is to get a decent job and have the financial stability to give her children a better life.
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“I made it possible for my father to buy new wives”

She escaped from her husband. Ran to court. Got a divorce. All at the age of 10. Publishing her memoirs, Nujood Ali from Yemen began to break down barriers. Five years on, we visit Nujood to see how she is getting on. Her life, it seems, has only gone from really bad to less bad.

BY RNW correspondent Judith Spiegel, in the Yemeni capital Sana'a

The house I enter is dark and small. I am in Al Hasabah, an area of Sana’a where heavy fighting took place between government troops and tribesmen in the spring of 2011. On the bare concrete floor are some dirty mattresses and a jerry can with water. A wire without a light bulb hangs from the ceiling. The only decoration in the four square meter room is a poster of a car and one with Quranic verses.

I am confused. I was supposed to meet a girl rich by Yemeni standards. In the media Nujood was portrayed as a happy middle class girl, going to a private school, wanting to become a lawyer. My thoughts are interrupted when Nujood steps out of the darkness, wearing her best dress. 

Fled the fighting“I do not go to school anymore, maybe next year,” Nujood says with an apologetic look. “We had to flee during the war and ever since I didn’t go back to school. I do not live in my own house anymore, because my father lives there. He used to beat me, I cannot live with him.” His third wife kicked her out of the house that Nujood actually owns. It was bought for her with the help of the publisher of her book. 

Nujood’s book did well. But she is not the one who has benefited. Nujood explains: “My father gets a monthly salary, I think it comes from the publisher, but I am not sure. He gives me only 50 dollars a month, sometimes I get nothing.” Suddenly she realises: “I made it possible for him to buy new wives.” 

No new lawA law to impose a minimum age for marriages, for both girls and boys, never made it through the Yemeni parliament. Religious scholars and other arties intervened to prevent it. Fathers in Yemen can still marry their daughters off as young as eight or nine. 

Bad advertising
The Yemeni authorities have twice denied Nujood permission to travel. Both times she had been invited abroad to receive an award. But the government clearly feels the story of a nine-year old child bride is one better not told to the world. More bad advertising for a country that still ranks at the bottom of the list when it comes to gender equality.

Nujood is not angry, for her this is life. She used to dream of becoming a lawyer, of travelling, of getting scholarships. It did not happen. But Nujood tries to see things positively: “After the book we had a house and food.” Nujood gives me one of her sweet smiles again. She touches my hand, shows me her black nail polish and wants to be in a photo.

Never everThe 13 or 14 year old (Nujood is not sure), is no longer married to a much older man who raped and beat her. She still hopes to go back to school, but does not seem very sure she will. And how about marriage, will she ever get married again? “Never ever ever ever!” 

The publisher has not responded to a request for information about why the book revenues are not paid directly to Nujood and whether anyone is monitoring the situation. Source

India's Muslims grapple with wedding racket

 Until recently, Hyderabad was hotspot for a disturbing form of sexual tourism, practiced mainly by visitors from Islamic countries, especially in the Arab world.

Seeking a short-term liaison, but wanting not to violate religious prohibitions against adultery, such visitors enter into brief, arranged marriages for a fee – often with girls young enough to be their granddaughters.

"In 90% of cases the women are as young as 15 and 80% of the time they are divorced within a week of the wedding ceremony," Bina Hassan, a women rights activist who has campaigned against this practice for years, told Khabar South Asia. "In rare cases the same girl is married numerous times, [though] usually the Arabs look for only virgins."

Many people have benefitted from such arrangements. The men can claim that they had not sinned according to Islam, which permits polygamy. Meanwhile, financial proceeds go to the girls' families, the agents who negotiate the deals, and the qazis (priests) who officiate.

For the brides, however, the results can be grim. After being deserted by their temporary husbands, they often find themselves without a home to return to. Their parents feel a sense of social stigma and want nothing to do with them. A real marriage is out of reach.

Community moves to end practice

Over the past two years, the Muslim community in Hyderabad has worked together with the government in order to halt such marriages and better protect local women. The results have been impressive. In 2012, only two such weddings were reported – compared to 58 during 2011.

Elders on the state Waqf Board played an instrumental role, government sources say.

"These weddings have been going on for decades, but no steps had been taken. The government decided to work through the Waqf Board because merely banning these weddings would not have produced any result. We needed the co-operation of the Muslim population," Andhra Pradesh Minister for Minorities Welfare Mohammed Ahmadullah told Khabar.

Waqf Board chairman Mohammad Saleem said one incident in particular galvanized opinion. "The straw that broke the camel's back was an incident in May 2012 in which a 73-year-old United Arab Emirates national became the centre of public ire when he tried to desert his bride of two days," he told Khabar.

According to journalist Omer Farooq, "the issue is quite dead now. The racket no longer flourishes."

Poverty cited as underlying cause

The grim economic picture for Muslims residing in Hyderabad's old-city quarter provides a context for the proliferation of dubious marriages. Packed into a medieval walled city, residents have the lowest literacy rate for women and a per capita income far lower than the Andhra Pradesh average of Rs. 71,540 ($1319).

The computer software industry – which gave the city its new nickname of "Cyberabad" – has had little impact on the urban Muslim community. "It's a ghetto, where people live in grimy conditions without access to even running water," Waqf Board general secretary Rumaan Idris Ali told Khabar.

For some families caught up in such dire conditions, black market weddings appeared to provide a way out.

In one case, according to assistant commissioner of police S.K. Rao, a 14-year-old girl (name withheld) was married in 2008 to three different men, all of them as old as her grandfather.

"The girl was pretty and looked older than her real age. Today she works as a construction labourer in some other city," Rao told Khabar. "We were helpless because her family was supporting these marriages."

Mussrath, 16, was married to a man in his 50s but dumped after three days in a local hotel. Her father then fixed her marriage to 70-year-old man, Rashid Ali, from Dubai. "She was taken to the same hotel, used and divorced," Rao said.

Mussrath's father found a third groom – 63-year-old Ahdul Rehman Abdullah from Oman – before her mother alerted the police.

Stories like this are becoming far less common, Waqf Board general secretary Ali said. Thanks to community vigilance, he said, young girls are no longer preyed on by racketeers.

But the discarded wives require rehabilitation. "They lack the means to put up legal fights. So the government must take up their cases," he said.

Racket moves to Mumbai

While sham marriages are becoming a thing of the past in Hyderabad, the problem is far from being resolved in India as a whole, authorities say. Rather, racketeers have simply moved their operations to other locations.

Mumbai, in particular, appears to be the new destination of choice for "grooms" seeking a no-strings-attached wedding.

The city's police on December 28th cracked an operation involving agents that brought young girls from Hyderabad to take advantage of the unreformed situation in Mumbai. In the suburb of Dongri, police rescued 12 girls – some as young as 13 – who were being paraded before Arabs by agents who had brought them in by overnight train.

"The girls were promised Rs. 200,000 ($3,700), out of which the agents would keep half," Assistant Police Commissioner (Women's Cell) Savithri Waslankar told Khabar. "Their aim was to have as many weddings as possible in the span of a few weeks so that they could make enough money to return home."

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National Geographic Live! : Too Young to Wed

Child brides blot tribal Pakistan

Islamabad, Pakistan - As international headlines for much of this month focused on the attack on 14-year-old activist Malala Yousafzai by the Taliban, what generally went unnoticed was the outrageous plight of more than a dozen young girls in Pakistan.

Last month, a blood feud between two battling tribes in the Dera Bugti district of Balochistan province was settled by a tribal "Jirga" (assembly of elders) that decided to hand over as many as 13 young girls in "vani" - an age-old tribal custom that gives females in marriage to males of another tribal group to settle a dispute.

The punishment was handed down by the Jirga allegedly presided over by a member of the Balochistan provincial assembly, Mir Tariq Masoori Bugti. Members of the legislator's clan, however, denied that he had chaired the Jirga, saying he was in Multan at the time.

On October 9, the Supreme Court took notice of media reports on the issue and summoned Mir Tariq as well as the deputy commissioner of Dera Bugti to explain the facts of the case.

"Mir Tariq absolutely did chair that Jirga; you can ask anyone in the Dera Bugti area," Ghulam Nabi Shahani, an elder of the rival Shahani Masoori tribe, said. "He was in attendance for two hours, and his brothers also joined proceedings later."

Nabi also alledged that Mir Tariq's guards held a man from his tribe hostage till all 13 girls were handed over along with a Rs3 million (about $30,000) fine.

Un-Islamic practice

Child marriage - known as "swara" in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, "vani" in Punjab, "sang chati" in Sindh, and "vani" and "lajai" in Balochistan - are enacted in disturbingly large swathes of Pakistan and reinforced by customs that treat women as commodities.

Despite the fact that Pakistan is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, which refers to early marriage as the marriage of people less than 18 years of age, 30 per cent of all marriages in the country fall in the category of child marriages, according to the Rahnuma-Family Planning Association of Pakistan.

"These young girls can be subject to rape while still minors," said Samar Minallah, a human rights activist who in 2004 filed a petition in the Supreme Court against the handing over of women as compensation to settle disputes. While Minallah's petition is still being heard, the vani of at least 70 girls has been blocked by the court since.

At a gathering of women parliamentarians and child marriage survivors organised by a local NGO, 15-year-old Shagufta, from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa's capital city of Peshwar, revealed that she was forcibly married at 10 to a boy of the same age. "It seemed like they just wanted a domestic servant," she said. 

Rukhsana, also from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, was 11 when she was married to a 20-year-old man. "On the first night, my mother-in-law forced me to spend the night with my father-in-law and said this was their custom," she recounted. 

Fiza Batool Gilani, the goodwill ambassador for Women's Empowerment, decried the practices as "totally un-Islamic".

"Nowhere does Islam say it is okay to treat women like commodities instead of human beings," Gilani said. 

Formally, these marriages are prohibited in Pakistan under the Child Marriages Restraint Act, 1929, which punishes offenders with one-month imprisonment and/or a fine of Rs1000 (approximately $12).

But the law, according to many observers, is incomplete and hard to implement.

"Conviction under this law does not serve to nullify the marriage, nor is child marriage a cognisable offence, which means that the police cannot intervene directly," Usma Tahir, a policy manager at ActionAid pakistan, said.

Power politics

Government officials are often quick to trot out a list of fresh pro-women legislation enacted by the Pakistan People's Party-led coalition government in the last four and a half years.

However, many who hail from areas where vani and other crimes against women are prevalent remain sceptical that the new legislations will change anything. 

"All these laws will mean nothing as long as parallel systems of governance and administration are in place," former deputy speaker of the National Assembly Sardar Wazir Jogezai said. "As things stand now, half the problems here are solved through Jirgas and the rest through constitutional laws and electoral politics. This confusion only leads to more problems."

Explaining the recent vani case in Dera Bugti, Jogazai said the problem arose because Mir Tariq, who allegedly chaired the Jirga that delivered the extraordinary punishment, was both a parliamentarian and a tribal head. "When you have to balance the demands of justice, the tribe and your voters, justice will inevitably take the back seat."

Meanwhile, officials in the federal government say they are unable to fully enforce laws in the provinces after a recent amendment to the constitution placed women's rights under the jurisdiction of provincial leadership. 

"It is now for the provinces to make comprehensive legislation and implement them to protect women from harmful traditional practices," Gilani explained.

Feudal system
Other rights activists believe that vanis cannot be ended until the system of governance in provinces like Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is overhauled. 

While the sardari (feudal) system in Balochistan was abolished in the early sixties, successive governments have failed to effectively implement the ban due to entrenched resistance from the feudal class. 

A Quetta-based journalist speaking on the condition of anonymity explained: "The sardars have so much power they can still order people to walk on fire to prove their innocence and hand over women to solve feuds."

On the other hand, there is also growing consensus that state security agencies are responsible for the sorry state of affairs in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

"All authority in the provinces is vested in the security forces, which enjoy complete impunity. There is a political government in these areas in name only," I A Rehman, the general secretary of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said. 

Poverty also plays a role in perpetuating anti-women practices. 

"Giving away a daughter in marriage is one less mouth at home to feed," explained Minallah. "In most cases, practices like vani involve the daughters of illiterate and poor people who don't have money or other assets to give as compensation."

Beyond repair?

While rolling back the system of governance and entrenched norms in these areas of Pakistan will be difficult, rights activists suggest the situation is not beyond repair.

"We've seen new legislation in the recent past, now the next step is working with law enforcement agencies," said Anis Haroon, Chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women, a statutory body that also acts as a watchdog body to ensure implementation of laws. "Police and other law enforcement have to be sensitised to the issues involved. Making them aware of what the law says is key."

Experts also suggest that culturally appropriate measures such as sensitising religious leaders, tribal elders and marriage contractors about the legal age of marriage will also prove effective.

"Evidence shows that the more education a girl receives, the less likely she is to marry as a child, so improving access to education for both girls and boys and eliminating gender gaps in education are also important in ending child marriages and practices like vani," Haroon added. 

Khawar Mumtaz, renowned Pakistani development activist who runs Shirkat Ghah, a leading women resource centre, also believes that as cases of vani and other types of violence against women are highlighted by the media and civil society, people's behaviour and mind-sets are already beginning to change. "As the debate opens up and discussions intensify, the right amount of moral pressure will be created to end these practices. It is already happening," Mumtaz said.

Minallah s also hopeful: "The fact that Mir Tariq is vehemently denying that he chaired the recent Jirga is itself a signal: that he knows he has done something wrong, which will in turn send a message to other tribal people that this practice is unacceptable and unrepeatable."

In the words of Baloch leader Wazir Jogazai: "Vani may have been tradition once, but no one can claim today that it is anything but a crime."

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11-year-old girl married to 40-year-old man

Before their wedding ceremony begins in rural Afghanistan, a 40-year-old man sits to be photographed with his 11-year-old bride. The girl tells the photographer that she is sad to be engaged because she had hoped to become a teacher. Her favorite class was Dari, the local language, before she had to leave her studies to get married.

She is one of the 51 million child brides around the world today. And it's not just Muslims; it happens across many cultures and regions.

Photographer Stephanie Sinclair has traveled the world taking pictures, like the one of the Afghan couple, to document the phenomenon. Christiane Amanpour spoke with Sinclair about a book which features her photographs called, "Questions without Answers: The World in Pictures by the Photographers of VII."

Amanpour asked Sinclair if the 11-year-old Afghan girl married in 2005, and others like her, consummate their marriages at such an early age. Sinclair says while many Afghans told her the men would wait until puberty, women pulled her aside to tell her that indeed the men do have sex with the prepubescent brides.

Sinclair has been working on the project for nearly a decade. She goes into the areas with help from people in these communities who want the practice to stop, because they see the harmful repercussions.

In Yemen, a similar picture. Tehani and Ghada are sisters-in-law photographed with their husbands, who are both members of the military. Like most of the girls, Tehani didn’t even know she was getting married, until the wedding night. She was six years old.

Tehani describes how she entered the marriage, “They were decorating my hands, but I didn’t know they were going to marry me off. Then my mother came in and said, ‘Come on my daughter.’ They were dressing me up and I was asking, ‘Where are you taking me?’”

Sinclair says, “This harmful, traditional practice of child marriage is just so embedded in some of these cultures that the families don't protect them as they should.”

The subjects do know they’re being photographed and Sinclair tells them the topic she is working on. She does tell them that there is teen pregnancy in places like the U.S., but for the societies she’s photographing it’s even worse that 13-year-old girls are pregnant and unmarried.

Another one of the photographs Sinclair took is of a Yemeni girl named Nujood Ali. In a rare turn of events, Ali managed to get a divorce at age 10.

“A couple months after she was married, she went to the court and found a lawyer – a woman named Shada Nasser and asked her to help her get a divorce, and she was granted [it],” Sinclair says. “It's definitely rare and Nujood became kind of an international symbol of child marriage, because she was able to do this. And I think she's inspired a lot of other girls and other organizations to support these girls, to have a stronger voice.”

Sinclair has documented the practice outside of the Muslim world. In a Christian community in Ethiopia, she captured the image of a 14 year-old girl named Leyualem in a scene that looks like an abduction. Leyualem was whisked away on a mule with a sheet covering up her face. Sinclair asked the groomsmen why they covered her up; they said it was so she would not be able to find her way back home, if she wanted to escape the marriage.

Sinclair travelled to India and Nepal, and photographed child marriages among some Hindus.

A five-year-old Hindu girl named Rajni was married under cover of night: “Literally at four o'clock in the morning. And her two older sisters were married to two other boys,” Sinclair says. “Often you see these group marriages because the girl and the families can't afford to have three weddings.” In the five-year-old girl’s case, Rajni will continue to live with her own family for several years.

Girls aren’t always the only ones forced into marriage. Sinclair wanted to photograph child marries in India and Nepal, because sometimes the boys entering a marriage are also young. “And often they're victims just as much of this harmful traditional practice,” she says.

Sinclair told Amanpour that she hopes her photographs would not only highlight the problems to westerners, but also show people in the areas where this takes place that  if the girls continue to be taken out of the population to forcibly work at home, that their communities suffer as a whole.

“It's a harmful traditional practice that is slowly changing. We just want to have it change even faster.”

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Girl brides in Yemen: the fight for the right to say no

"A mother of a 13 year old girl in the rural north of Yemen contacted us, asking for help after her daughter died due to bleeding on the marriage night." Normally, you would expect to encounter such stories in NGO reports, but it is the Yemeni Minister for Human Rights, Hooria Mashhour, who is disarmingly forthcoming about the problem facing girls in her country.

"Child marriage is happening across the Arab countries, but it is more widespread in Yemen, based on the cultural tribal traditions", she explains. "During my work with the Women National Committee I've encountered many sad cases. Even within the office, the cleaner said that she was forced to get married at the age of 12, which caused her medical complication in the urinary system and she needed treatment to recover."

In a country that has recently ousted its president after 33 years in power, surprisingly little has changed for girls who are forced to get married before they reach adulthood. According to a 2008 study by the Gender Development Research and Studies Centre in Sana'a, just over half of girls are married before their eighteenth birthday - some as young as eight. Admittedly, the problem is not unique to Yemen: in May 2012, the Grand Mufti of the neighbouring Saudi Arabia suggested that girls can be married aged 10. However, in a recent report, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown notes that Yemen has the second highest number of mothers under the age of 15, out of the 16 countries where child marriage and pregnancy is most prevalent.

Unlike other developing countries who have raised the minimum age for marriage,Yemen has, in 1999, scrapped it altogether. Attempts by MPs to re-instate it in 2009, as well as protests on the streets and campaigns by the Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkul Karman, have not succeeded. Meanwhile, the fragile political situation and the fight against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has overshadowed human rights issues. "The war on terrorism has affected child rights by preventing them from being top priorities of the national agenda, and generally has put security ahead of development and human rights issues", says Mashhour.

Child marriage affects primarily young brides, but it also exacerbates many of the social and economic problems in Yemen, hindering the country from making further progress. Married girls often drop out of school, leaving them illiterate and unskilled, thus prevented from ever achieving self-sufficiency.

Aisha, a 25 year old Yemeni now living in the UK, tells the story of her mother, Bushra, who was forced to marry aged 13. Bushra's husband forbade her to attend secondary school or seek work. Aged 20, she already had four children, while her husband had married an additional wife.

Today, Bushra continues to suffer from health problems caused by her pregnancies, but she considers herself lucky compared to many others. Early teenage pregnancy carries a high risk of life threatening obstructed labour due to the undeveloped narrow hips, in addition to other conditions, such as fistula. In a country with one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the region, early marriages have cost many girls their lives.

Some would argue that legislation is the answer. In Ethiopia, for example, the legal minimum age for marriage was raised to 18 in 2005. However, Jeffrey Edmeades of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) says this has had "very little effect on marriage rates".

Experience from other countries offers alternatives. Initiatives at the grassroots level used to tackle similar problems in Africa "can be adopted by Yemen" says Naana Otoo-Oyortey, the Executive Director of Forward, an African Diaspora women's charity. Forward has set up income-generating schemes for existing child mothers, as well as girls' clubs in schools, dispensing information and advice. In India, a programme called Apni Beti Apna Dhan ('Our Daughters, Our Wealth') works on the basis of cash incentives: a girl and her family can withdraw a sum of money if the girl turns 18 unwed. This initiative, reports The Daily Beast, saw an 18 percent drop in the practice between 1992 and 2006.

Similar ideas are being developed in the Yemeni diaspora. Lubna Maktari of the UK based Independent Yemen Group describes an initiative to educate and empower those outside of the main cities. "Over 70% of the Yemeni population lives in the rural areas, with limited or no electricity" The group wants to broadcast educational programmes on wind-up radios, providing basic skills, as well as support and information.

Laura Dickinson of 'Girls Not Brides', a new global partnership of organisations committed to ending child marriage, says that such initiatives are "definitely helpful" and have already been successfully used in places like Pakistan and Nepal. "This shatters the silence that has long existed around the subject of child marriage. In turn, girls feel there is support out there that they can access". The educational impact is also key - as well as providing girls with more choices, Dickinson says "it helps generate a change in the families' attitudes, removing the idea that girls are a burden."

A shift in thinking is also necessary, says Mashhour. In Yemen, "the main actors that could play a significant role are open-minded Muslim scholars because of their influence on communities. The new leaders and journalists that emerged during the revolution also have an important role in steering public opinion and resisting the radical rhetoric."

Paradoxically for Aisha, it was her father who pushed her towards education rather than marriage. "He insisted that I not only finish primary and secondary schools, but go on to university and study abroad. I think it was because he didn't want me to go through what his wives had experienced." Aisha now has a daughter of her own. "I remember my mother's lack of choice. Today, when my daughter says 'no' to me, I feel so proud of her."

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