Update: Yemeni underage marriage challenged
Jun 29th, 2008 by Holly Fox
When I blogged about the little Yemeni girl who filed for divorce from her 30-year-old husband by herself here, the story hadn’t been picked up by many major news outlets. Now the New York Times has an in-depth story on how that girl and another are changing the way Yemenis look at child marriage.
“Voices are rising in society against this phenomenon and its catastrophes,” said Shawki al-Qadhi, an imam and opposition member in Parliament who has tried unsuccessfully to muster support for a legal ban on child marriage in Yemen in the past. “But despite rejections of it by many people and some religious scholars, it continues.”
Current law in Yemen allows girls to be married at any age as long as they do not live with their husbands until they have reached puberty. As the two girls’ experiences described in the article underscore, this law is often not followed. A total ban on underage marriage would protect girls better than the current situation, say activists.
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