Mick Hartley

That 8-year-old Yemeni girl has been granted her divorce:

A Yemeni court on Tuesday granted a divorce to an eight-year-old girl whose unemployed father forced her into an arranged marriage this year, saying he feared she might be kidnapped.

“I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school,” Nojud Mohammed Ali said, after a public hearing in Sanaa’s court of first instance.

Her former husband, 28-year-old Faez Ali Thameur, said he married the child “with her consent and that of her parents” but that he did not object to her divorce petition.

In response to a question from Judge Mohammed al-Qadhi, he acknowledged that the “marriage was consummated, but I did not beat her.” …

Nojud was a second grader in primary school when the marriage took place two and a half months ago.

Child brides are common in Afghanistan, too:

Farida (not her real name) was paid 40,000 Afghani (£400) last summer for marrying her 13-year-old daughter to her father’s 20-year-old cousin.

The child, her freckled face half hidden behind a blue veil, says she does not like her husband, and begins to cry.

“I didn’t want to marry, it was my parents’ decision,” she said. “I dreamed I would be able to finish my education. I had no choice.”

Asked why she is making her daughter unhappy, Farida replies simply: “It is her life, it is her fate.”

Badakhshan’s independent MP Fauzia Kofi says she has seen an increasing number of such child brides in the last two years.

“I don’t call it marriage, I call it selling children,” she says.

“A nine or 10-year-old – you give her away for wheat and two cows.” […]

A midwife in the village of Khordakhan, Hanufa Mah, agrees that alleviating poverty is key.

She says she tries to teach parents not to marry their girls too young but some feel they have no choice.

One girl she helped through labour was only 10 years old.

“The girl was so small. I held her in my lap until the child was born,” she says.

UN figures show that more women die in childbirth in Badakhshan than anywhere else in the world, and mothers under the age of 15 are most at risk.

Since it’s generally accepted that Mohammed himself consummated his marriage to Aisha when she was 9 years old, and Islamic experts continue to justify child marriage on the grounds that girls get their periods at an early age in Islamic countries, it may take more than poverty alleviation to bring about a change.