Wednesday, August 07, 2013

‘Some girls have been married 60 times by the time they turn 18′

When young girls are sold into marriage, as 38,000 are every day, they can expect a life with no education and few opportunities, little public autonomy outside of their adult husband’s control and an increased risk of death from pregnancy or childbirth, which are the number one killer of girls age 15 to 18 in the developing world. One in seven girls born in the developing world is married by age 15, usually sold by her family.

But some girls who grow up in Egypt’s poor rural communities face an even scarier sort of child marriage: the temporary kind. Sex tourism to Egypt tends to spike in the summer, when wealthy men from Gulf countries flood into Egypt and thousands of underage girls are sold by their parents into temporary “marriages,” according to a story by Inter Press Service.

Child sex tourism is difficult to track, but the United Nations estimates that it affects two million children every year, often in countries that are poor but have preexisting tourism infrastructure, such as Thailand, India, Costa Rica and others.

Egypt’s illegal child sex tourism trade appears to have put a regional-friendly spin on the practice by portraying the buying and selling of children as a form of marriage, thus giving them a thin veneer of religious acceptability by circumventing Islamic rules against pre-marital sex. (Despite a 2008 law banning child marriages, enforcement is thought to be low and an Egyptian official told the Inter Press Service that’s it’s nearly ceased since the chaos of the 2011 revolution.) Child marriages are, after all, somewhat common in Arab countries, although not nearly as common as in neighboring regions. And such child marriages often involve “dowries” that human trafficking activists say are akin to a purchase price. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Teenager exposes India's 'one month wives' sex tourism...
  2. Syria's refugee brides: “The Saudis usually ask for 12-year-olds.”
  3. 11-year-old Yemeni girl on forced marriages: I'd rather kill myself...
  4. Nigerian girls sold into sex slavery in Italy...
  5. Chinese sex abuse: sleep with me, not kids...

No comments:

Post a Comment