Mick Hartley

This story provides an interesting insight into child marriage in Saudi Arabia, as the girls' mother, unusually, was prepared to fight back:

Despite continuous efforts by private and government bodies to eliminate marriages involving minors, such marriages do take place every so often. In a recent case, two sisters from Al-Jouf, aged 13 and 14, were married off by their father to two elderly men.

“Their father held their hands as they signed their marriage contracts. They did not know what they were signing,” said the mother of the two girls, Nowayer. “When I was informed, I rushed to their father’s house and confronted the marriage contractor asking him whether he heard the girls consent to the marriages, and whether he had seen results of their premarital tests. He replied it was the father’s prerogative to marry them,” she added.

Nowayer, an educational supervisor and mother of five girls and one boy, said she was in an abusive marriage for over eight years before filing for divorce. She said her ex-husband was aggressive, uncivilized and irresponsible.

“When I asked him to divorce me he refused, something that forced me to go to court to file for khula (a form of divorce granted under Islamic law in which a woman is able to secure a divorce in lieu of financial compensation),” she said.

Her husband demanded SR100,000, a sum Nowayer was unable to pay, and she remained trapped for more than two years. “I tried to explain to the judge that I did not have the money and that my dowry was not even close to this amount, but the judge insisted,” said Nowayer, adding she was able to convince her ex-husband to reduce the amount to SR70,000, which she was able to raise with the help of her family.

After securing a divorce, Nowayer’s difficulties increased as her husband used her children to make her life more difficult. “He would not pay child support or even ask about them for months. Sometimes, he would take them and forbid me from seeing them for months,” she said.

She added that her ex-husband totally ignored her children for 18 months before their marriages. “One day, last month, he called asking the older girls, who are 13 and 14, to dress up as he would be picking them up and taking them to a family occasion,” she said.

It was only when she received a phone call from her sister that she realized what was going on. “I rushed to his house barefoot to find that the marriage contractor had begun my little children’s marriages,” she said. 

Nowayer sent a telegram to the minister of justice and the minister of health asking them to interfere, but received no response. “I even informed the Social Services Department in Riyadh who promised to interfere but as soon as the issue reached the Al-Jouf province, where I live and where my ex-husband has many connections because of his line of work, things got stalled,” she said. […]

In the meantime, Nowayer — prevented from seeing her daughters by her former in-laws — waits for a solution to her problem.

“I wonder when there will be a law protecting women and children from being lost in this weird system. I struggled to get a divorce. I was deprived from alimony and my children did not receive child support. Finally, I’ve ended up losing my little girls who are no more than kids to a marriage that I know for sure they have no understanding or comprehension of,” said Nowayer. “We need a law organizing the family.”

"Despite continuous efforts by private and government bodies to eliminate marriages involving minors"….efforts which will continue to run slap-bang into a wall as long as Islamic law is invoked as the ultimate authority.