Married at Age 8, Divorced at 10: Story of an Empowered Child Bride

by Alex DiBranco · 2010-03-07 15:27:00 UTC
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At eight years old, when most little girls are playing with dolls and stickers, Nujood Ali was making her way to a Yemeni courthouse to demand a divorce from an older husband who regularly beat and raped her. Her groundbreaking win at age 10 set the stage for other child brides in Yemen and around the world to seek divorces from the man they were married off to, and got her recognized in Glamour's Women of the Year right alongside Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.

Amanda Kloer writes on the End Human Trafficking blog about Ali's new autobiography, I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced. Unfortunately, Ali's story is far from unusual. Half of Yemeni girls are married off before they hit 18; over a quarter are younger than 15 -- by the time a girl hits high school age, she's already starting to look less marriageable.

These early marriages are deemed desirable to fend off the possibility that a girl might "shame" her family by getting involved with a boy and as a financial arrangement by poor families. While in cases like Ali's the husband often promises the parents he'll wait to have sexual intercourse until his bride is older, if he goes ahead and rapes his new wife, there's nothing stopping him. Last year, a 12-year-old Yemeni girl died in labor, her immature body not ready for pregnancy.

And instead of punishing the husband for rape and abuse, Ali had to pay him a penalty fee for the divorce. The best thing would be for these girls not to be married off at such a young age in the first place, but a proposed Yemeni law to raise the marriage age to 17 or 18 has run up against considerable opposition. Of course, empowering and educating women and girls provides another way to counteract the forces that pressure families to give eight-year-old girls away in marriage.

Photo credit: ai@ce

Alex DiBranco is a Change.org Editor who has worked for the Nation, Political Research Associates, and the Center for American Progress. She is now based in New York City.
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