Eight-Year-Old Yemeni ‘Wife’ Seeking Divorce

An eight-year-old girl has sought the help of a court judge to seek a divorce after two months of forced marriage to a 30-year-old man in Yemen, press reports said on Sunday.

Nojoud Muhammad Nasser lodged a compliant at a court in the capital Sana’a last week against her father who forced her to marry a man 22 years her senior, and asked the judge to secure her divorce.

Presiding judge Muhammed al-Qadhi ordered the father and husband to be arrested after he heard her testimony in which she accused her husband of sexual and domestic abuse.

The father was later released due to health problems.

“He used to do bad things to me, and I had no idea as to what a marriage is,” the child-wife told the Yemen Times about her husband.

“I would run from one room to another in order to escape, but in the end he would catch me and beat me and then continued to do what he wanted,” the girl said.

“Whenever I wanted to play in the yard he beat me and asked me to go to the bedroom with him. This lasted for two months.”

Early marriage is prevalent in rural and urban areas of this impoverished Arab country as no law sets the age of marriage.

Source: IOL – 13 April 2008