25,000 Under-age Girls Are Married Every Day

Child marriage is nothing other than the institutionalization of child abuse. It's a system to keep women in their place so that when they are handed over to some old brute while they are still girls, by the time they understand the crime committed against them they are trapped in permanent surrender of their most basic rights. It's a disgusting practice and a smear on what we purport to be human civilization, in that it continues to occur at the behest of parents, relatives and communities in many countries at the rate of 100 million girls who will be married off over the next decade. I don't like it. And I explain why in this article at Butterflies and Wheels this week:

Last year, at a women’s community centre in Kabul I met Hamida.* A Herati, she was staying with relatives in the teeming capital, after her husband left her destitute when he left to go work in Iran, where she suspected he maintained another family. She had been married to him for seven years before divorcing him three years ago. In her married life, she had experienced extraordinary abuse at the hands of both her husband and her in-laws, with whom she lived. After making the courageous decision to leave her husband, she tried to return to her father’s household but was turned away, hence the reason she was boarding with an aunt and an uncle in Kabul, far away from her native Herat. A survivor of domestic violence, a divorcee, illiterate and uneducated, Hamida had lived a tumultuous life and bore the scars of years of drudgery in a joyless marriage.

Here’s the thing about Hamida: she’s 17. Sixteen when I met her last spring.

Read the full article here.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.