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Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows.
They squatted side by side on the dirt, a crowd of village women holding sari cloth around them as a makeshift curtain, and poured soapy water from a metal pan over their heads. Two of the brides, the sisters Radha and Gora, were 15 and 13, old enough to understand what was happening. The third, their niece Rajani, was 5. She wore a pink T-shirt with a butterfly design on the shoulder. A grown-up helped her pull it off to bathe.
The grooms were en route from their own village, many miles away. No one could afford an elephant or the lavishly saddled horses that would have been ceremonially correct for the grooms' entrance to the wedding, so they were coming by car and were expected to arrive high-spirited and drunk. The only local person to have met the grooms was the father of the two oldest girls
Rajani was Mr. M's granddaughter, the child of his oldest married daughter. She had round brown eyes, a broad little nose, and skin the color of milk chocolate. She lived with her grandparents. Her mother had moved to her husband's village, as rural married Indian women are expected to do, and this husband, Rajani's father, was rumored to be a drinker and a bad farmer. The villagers said it was the grandfather, Mr. M, who loved Rajani most; you could see this in the way he had arranged a groom for her from the respectable family into which her aunt Radha was also being married.
Child marriage spans continents, language, religion, caste. In India the girls will typically be attached to boys four or five years older; in Yemen, Afghanistan, and other countries with high early marriage rates, the husbands may be young men or middle-aged widowers or abductors who rape first and claim their victims as wives afterward, as is the practice in certain regions of Ethiopia.
Some of these marriages are business transactions, barely adorned with additional rationale: a debt cleared in exchange for an 8-year-old bride; a family feud resolved by the delivery of a virginal 12-year-old cousin. Those, when they happen to surface publicly, make for clear and outrage-inducing news fodder from great distances away. The 2008 drama of Nujood Ali, the 10-year-old Yemeni girl who found her way alone to an urban courthouse to request a divorce from the man in his 30s her father had forced her to marry, generated worldwide headlines and more recently a book, translated into 30 languages: I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.
[The father of the child brides] knew that if a nonbribable police officer found out what was under way, the wedding might be interrupted mid-ceremony, bringing criminal arrests and lingering shame to his family.
In India the girls
Bahrain
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Iran
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Israel
Jordan
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Lebanon
Oman
Gaza Strip
West Bank
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Turkey
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Originally posted by furzball
reply to post by acrux
The main story of the article takes place in india while the rest of the article listed various places in the middle east. So the placement of this article seems fair to me. And the rant is no more then what has already thought of afghan men who practice pedophilia on boys(notice I included full description rather then just saying "men" or "all men of afghan"). I mean, heck, go watch the movie Kite, sad story about boys being raped in afghan. So the OP's rant was straight to the point rather then precise. Main notice we should be taking is the article. OP's rant=little picture. Article=big picture.
Originally posted by greeneyedleo
I have told this story here before....somewhere, but it is worth repeating....
[...]
All those women we had befriended and chatted with for so long....they all had gone thru the same thing. It was normal and just part of their culture. The little girl who was so very shy was now married to an adult man. The man she married was 21.
This is a very very real part of their world. And it is a custom I shall never ever support.
Back then, if I was the person I am now...I would have called police. I would have tried to stop it. But I did nothing.....