Julie L. Kessler
lawyer traveler writer

News

For the love of a child

In the seemingly endless newsfeed to which so many of us find ourselves exposed, becoming sufficiently hardened to the onslaught of shockingly bad news appears to be a method of self-preservation. However, sometimes the bad news is so heartbreaking, so gut-wrenching, so unconscionable, that the air you breathe seems literally stolen from you.

 

That is what happened to me last week when I learned of an eight-year-old Yemeni girl who was forced to marry a forty-year-old man. If that were not awful enough, the young girl died of internal bleeding and uterine rupture on her wedding night.

 

Most of us in the West almost don’t possess the parameters within which to process such news, much less accept it.

 

The Republic of Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, has a relatively recent genesis. In 1990, the traditional North and Communist South merged after years of clashes. Modernization attempts have been slow at best, and the country still retains much of its tribal character. The intervening years since the unified country’s birth have seen a civil war in 1994 that left 250,000 dead, and in 2011, protests inspired by the Arab Spring ultimately resulted in the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a man who had run North Yemen, and then the unified country, for a total of thirty years. Following the closure of their bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda filtered into Yemen, and it became a major Al Qaeda stronghold.

 

Yemen also has the highest illiteracy rate in the region. The literacy rate for women is approximately 40 percent, compared to 70 percent for men. This gap is explained by traditional views on female education, which is thought at best to be inconsequential, and at worst to be in direct opposition to a girl’s good morals.

 

Poverty, tribal warfare, political instability, illiteracy. A veritable guaranteed recipe for disaster of the type to which we have just borne witness.

 

Human Rights Watch reports that 14 percent of Yemeni girls are married before the age of fifteen; however, the Social Affairs Ministry in 2010 reported that number to be 25 percent. Although Yemen passed a law in 2009 making it illegal for girls under seventeen to marry, the law was ultimately repealed after conservatives said it went against the teachings of Islam.

 

Is it the teachings of Islam against which the Minimum Age Law went? Or was it patriarchal and impoverished rural families’ inability to resist “bride prices” for their daughters that caused the law’s repeal?

 

For the eight-year-old Yemeni girl named Rawan, the reason (I simply cannot type the word rationale in this context) behind the law’s repeal matters not a damn. She was sold by her parents and now she is dead; killed by her purchaser in, without a doubt, the worst possible way. It is utterly impossible to try to imagine what her last thoughts were — or perhaps even her first, once her little eight-year-old mind began to grasp the truth of the awful, amoral transaction to which her parents had subjected her.

 

To add insult to injury, Yemen security officials deny the incident took place.

 

While we would especially like to in cases like this, we cannot legislate morality outside our borders. And although the EU foreign policy chief demanded that Yemen ban child marriage and reinstate the repealed Minimum Age Law in keeping with international norms, in all likelihood it will not happen anytime soon. Certainly we will hear of another child like Rawan dying a horrible and senseless death.

 

Simply put, only when a society values its girls to the same extent as it does its boys will this hideous type of child abuse finally commence its long-overdue dark ride into the annals of ancient history.

Date Posted:  Sep. 16 2013