Yemen was the country previously best known for being the place no one knew anything about. But it turns out that Yemeni culture has some interesting traits, like the fact that it is dominated by a highly-regressive and -repressive patriarchy where women are little more than prizes to be shuffled around between (often) vicious men who treat them as outlets for their repressed frustrations. Apparently girls as young as eight years of age are married off to men sometimes in their fifties in order to secure dowries or to unite families. Nujood, a young Yemeni girl, was ten years old when she was married off to a man in his thirties whose shocking violence caused her to take to the courthouse and declare a landmark decision that she be allowed to divorce him.
These things are very rarely included in tourism brochures, in fact I recently picked up a tourism brochure for Yemen that said, “Come for the rolling hills, stay for the fact that girls as young as eight are in no way forced to marry men much older than them!” As it turns out, that brochure was printing a bald-faced lie.
Far be it from me to question the practices of another culture outside my own, but I will say I think that Yemen has made a very positive step forward in allowing ten-year-old girls to divorce their husbands. Now all they need to be a modern society is to either make it illegal for men to force children to marry them, or Netflix. Either way would be good with me.
(Photo Via: The Princess Dress Up)
Comments
Gaby
August 14th, 2010 - 10:50:43 AM
It is just heartbreaking that such a young girl can be forced to be married to a man of any age. It is good to hear, though, that she was allowed to divorce. http://www.princessdresscostume.net
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