9/14/13: UPDATE: According to some in Yemen, the 8-year-old girl was never married let alone died. But who to believe?
While perusing some of my Facebook pages of interest I saw a link to an article about a Yemeni child bride who died after sexual intercourse. It sounded familiar so I assumed it was an old story from several years ago, but no, it's recent, and just another case of a young girl bleeding to death because her reproductive organs were mangled by her much older pedophile husband. The story I remembered was actually 12-year-old Elham Mahdi Shuee who bled to death three days after her wedding night. She had been forced to marry a 20-year-old. This latest case involved 8-year-old Rawan, who was married off to a 40-year-old and bled to death on her wedding night.
Activists are calling for punishment for both the girls parents and the "beastly groom", and an end to child marriage, although that won't come easy. Yemen child rights activists have been desperately trying, for several years now, to change the marriage laws to adequately reflect the emotional and physical age that a girl might be ready to marry. They believe the age limit should be 18. But they're butting heads with the Islamic extremists who believe a girl should marry at any age, after all their prophet Mohammad married one of his many wives when she was 10 years younger than the proposed age limit.
Sources: Gulf News, and Israel National News
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