Women Victimized by Yemeni ‘Exchange Marriages’

SANA'A -- Women living in areas of rural Yemen are increasingly losing their say regarding whom they marry as they become caught-up in the widespread phenomenon of ‘exchange marriages,’ in which money and family ties outweigh romance.

The expression rises from the phenomenon of spouses from two families being traded in what is essentially more of a business arrangement than a traditional marriage, Dr. Abdul-Baqi Shamsan, professor of sociology at Sana'a University, explained.

Shamsan told The Media Line that the main victim of this type of marriage is the woman. “In such exchange marriages, the women are dealt with as commodities by the family’s or group's elders, who strip them of their right to choose their life partners,” he said.

Poverty and tribal traditions push many people into marrying-off their children this way in order to avoid paying unaffordable high dowries or to strengthen ties between the families involved. But the prospect of these marriages ending in divorce is very high because usually if one couple breaks up, the other would most likely follow suit. Even if they don’t, the family-members from the second couple often intervene to end the second union as well.

So when Maha Saleh Al-Kawlani, 25, came home in tears and told her brother Mohammed that her husband Fuad had divorced and but kept their 18-month-old son with him, her family, which considered the divorce to be an act of ultimate disrespect to them, reacted with outrage.

Just a few days after his sister Maha’s divorce, Mohammed, seeking to get even with his brother-in-law for dishonoring his family, divorced his wife and Fuad's sister Jamila, keeping their two-year-old daughter with him. "From the time we got married, the family problems never stopped…Our marriages were dependent upon each other," Mohammed told The Media Line.

Their exchange marriage, which had been arranged by Mohammed's father Saleh Al-Kawlani and his father-in-law three years earlier, according to Shamsan never stood much of a chance because, he said, “exchange marriages are not based on acceptance, love and respect. Whenever one couple doesn't get along and breaks up, the other part of the business deal is that the other couple will likely break up as well.”

A similar story exposing the hazards of exchange marriages was told by translator Abdusalam Rajeh, 35, who married his cousin twelve years ago, and in turn, two of his cousins married two of his sisters. Rajeh said his father and uncle arranged their marriages, but nevertheless asked the would-be brides and grooms for their opinions.
“Unfortunately, most of the family problems that my wife and I experienced stemmed from external factors. For instance, if my sister and her husband quarreled, our marriage would be affected,” Rajeh recounted.

The father of six, Rajeh said his wife was taken forcibly from him by her father to her father's house more than once after Rajeh's sister went to Rajeh's family's home because of quarrels with her husband.

"Sometimes we had problems and the other couple was adversely affected," he said, adding, "Indeed, problems from the exchange marriage sent my marriage to the verge of collapse more than once.”

Things became so bad that he divorced his wife four years ago. "But my love for my kids and my wife; and my determination not to break up this family," led him to take her back, he explained to The Media Line.

According to Islamic law, a husband can be re-married to his ex-wife if he divorced her once or twice, but after the third divorce she must first be married to another man in order for her original husband to marry her again. This time, Rajeh said he took no chances, making an agreement with his uncle and brother-in-law that if one couple had problems, this must not have any effect at all on the other couple.

"However, I still feel that my marriage is not based on a firm foundation and is therefore prone to collapse at any time," Rajeh rued. “Though the interference of families in our marriages has significantly decreased since the agreement, it still sometimes comes into play."

Rajeh’s wife, 30-year old Shams Ahmed, told The Media Line that, "Exchange marriages simply mean unending problems [usually] resulting from other people's actions which we have nothing to do with.”

While there are no statistics on how many people are involved in exchange marriages, Abdulmalik Salah, a sociologist at the Yemen Center for Social Studies and Research Labor, told The Media Line that, "According to our knowledge of Yemeni society, we can say it's a widespread phenomenon in the rural areas, especially in poverty-stricken ones." Such areas constitute around 70 percent of the country.” According to Salah, some 60 per cent of couples marrying this way end up divorcing.

Salah said that the factors behind this widespread phenomenon include the harsh economic conditions, the high illiteracy rates among people in the rural areas, and their lack of religious understanding. Exchange marriage is actually prohibited in Islam, so Salah says that some people agree to pay low dowries to each other in order to get around this religious prohibition. For example, what might have been an expected dowry of $5,000 might instead end up no more than $100, according to Salah.

Shamsan agreed with Salah, adding that, "Some tribal people adopt this form of marriage in order to strengthen the bonds between their families; or uses it in an attempt to extend their influence." However, he said this often backfires as the relationship between the two groups or tribes involved in the exchange marriage turns sour when because of the divorce of one or both of the couples.

Indeed, Mohammed's father, Saleh Al-Kawlani, told The Media Line that, "The good relationship that I used to share with my cousin Ali turned into animosity after we married our children in an exchange marriage. Now, we don't even say ‘Hi’ when we cross the road.”

Mohammed himself hopes to put the whole experience behind him by marrying again, but stressed he would “never, ever marry or let any members of the family get married in an exchange marriage.”

His father agreed, saying, “I should never have arranged such marriages for my children. I had heard a lot about the ill-effects of exchange marriage, but I did not believe them before. I would never accept my children marrying in this way -- ever again.”

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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

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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