Child
Marriage in Yemen Seen As a Means of Survival
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
April 29, 2019
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There was no more money. There was only bread and tea for weeks. There
was so much hunger, and so many children.
And so the couple agreed to let the man wed their youngest daughter, for
a dowry payment they desperately needed in order to feed the rest.
The bride was just 3 years old.
According to an Oxfam report, child marriage – already long a problem in
war-torn Yemen – has increased as the devastation of the war there worsens
and an estimated 14 million face famine. In a published statement,
Oxfam's Yemen Country Director Muhsin Siddiquey remarked, "As this war has gone on, people's means
of coping with devastating levels of hunger have become more and more
desperate. They're being forced to take steps that blight their children's
lives now and for decades to come."
Oxfam is an international NGO devoted to fighting
global poverty.
Parents in Yemen now frequently forego meals so their children can eat,
but even those meals – usually bread and tea or mashed tomato pulp – are
spare and few. Some families eat just one meal a day. The images of starving and
dying children have spread through social media, but no solution has been
forthcoming as the conflict continues. For many parents, marrying off
daughters in exchange for dowry has become a question of survival.
Yemen has no minimum age for marriage, reports the United Nations Family Population Agency
(UNFPA), with almost one third of women surveyed in 2013 having wed before
the age of 18. According to the Denver Post , laws setting a
marriage age at 15 were repealed in the 1990s "under pressure from Muslim
conservatives who argue that Islamic Sharia law does not prohibit child
marriage and that attempts to curb the practice are a Western plot."
Hence even before the conflict, Yemeni fathers often forced their
daughters into marriage as an alleged means of "protection,"
saving their honor in the face of the possibility of rape – a fate that
could cause shame to the entire family.
With the war, which began with an attack by Houti rebels in 2014, that
percentage has increased, though actual figures are unavailable given the
current circumstances there. One 2016 UNFPA survey, however, noted that
"of the child marriage survivors in the North, 72 percent were married
between the ages 13 and 15. Of those in the South, 62 were married before
age 16."
Even girls as young as 10 might be married off, sometimes to men decades
older; Since husbands are legally forbidden
to consummate the marriage before the child reaches puberty, younger
girls become servants for their husbands, and occasionally their husbands'
parents.
One 9-year-old told Oxfam: "My mother-in-law keeps beating me, and
when I run away back to my father's house, my father beats me again for
running away. "
Horrific as these stories are, the parents are not entirely to blame. It
is the culture they have always lived in, one that has indoctrinated them
with the idea of women as nothing more than property, dehumanized objects
to be bought and sold and used. In this context, the decision to sell a
daughter into marriage may come as a desperate act to save the lives of
other sons and daughters. But the fact that the option exists at all is a
cultural depravity, not just their own.
And it isn't just the girls who suffer, as the IPT has reported, the concept of bride price, or dowry,
has also been weaponized as a recruitment tool for jihadist groups in
countries other than Yemen, such as South Sudan and Afghanistan. Indeed, according to Valerie Hudson, George H.W. Bush Chair in
the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M
University, bride price can be so high that it is only possible to marry by
joining the jihad, for which young men receive either salary or, in some
cases, a wife. As Hudson has noted, "These days, Hamas suicide bombers
know that when a terrorist blows himself up the financial payoff can buy
enough brides for his brothers to make his sacrifice worthwhile."
Yet it is exactly such practices which stimulate violence and warfare in
the first place – including the very war which caused Yemini famine and,
consequently, the sale of young girls as brides to feed the family. As Hudson and others
have noted, the disempowerment and dehumanization of women are "the
best predictor of a state's peacefulness."
And until such dehumanization, the continuing abuse and oppression of
women in these societies, stops, the cycle will not end.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands Her next book, on domestic abuse and terrorism,
will be published by Potomac Books. Follow her at @radicalstates.
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