Protecting Our Children

In the United States, most of us pride ourselves in how we care for our children. Most of us make sure they go to school, do their homework, go to the doctor's when they're sick, make sure they have their vaccinations, keep them safe from any number of things. We even have laws to keep our children safe, upgrading these laws as we see fit: laws to make sure that we keep them in car seats, keep them seat-belted in when they've outgrown their car seats, laws to require pedophiles and other sex offenders register with local police and maintain a certain distance away from schools. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need such laws, but this isn't a perfect world, even in the United States.

But as imperfect as the U.S. is, our children, for the most part, are luckier than those in other places. Yes, there are children in the U.S. born into poverty, those who are abused or neglected for a variety of reasons, those who need that "entire village" to protect them when their parents or guardians don't. That is a story for another day.

In the winter, 2009 issue of Ms. Magazine is an article about a brave girl in Yemn. The article Too Young to Marry by Allison Ford begins, "In April of 2008, 10-year old Nujood Ali walked into a courthouse and demanded a divorce. Raised in poverty in Yemen, she had been forced into marriage with a stranger by her father. Although she claimed that her 30-year-old husband beat and sexually abused her, her family refused to intervene (Ms. Magazine, winter 2009, p. 30)."

Yes, you read correctly. She was 10, her husband, 30. The article goes on to state that in Africa and South Asia, "42 percent and 48 percent (respectively) of girls are married before age 18. In especially poor countries such as Yemen, it is not unusual for girls to wed even before reaching puberty."

On May 1, 2009, the St. Petersburg (FL) Times carried an Associated Press article about a girl in Saudi Arabia. The article ("Girl, 8, divorces man, 50") states that "her father forced her to marry him in August in exchange for $13,000." According to the article, "there are no laws in Saudi Arabia deining the minimum age for marriage."

The same article, with added information, was published the same day in The Boston Globe. The Globe article (byline: Hadeel Al-Shalchi of the Associated Press) states, "The marriage was not the only one in the kingdom to receive attention. Saudi newspapers have higlighted several cases in which girls were married off including a 15-year-old girl whole father, a death-row inmate, married her off to a cell mate." http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2009/05/01/8_year_old_saudi_girl_granted_a_divorce/

Excuse me, but does anyone else find this especially disturbing? One can say, "But that's their culture," to which I ask, "What if that was your child? What if that child was you?"

Yes, we need to continue to protect our children. But when children around the world are treated the way these articles show, what kind of children will they raise? How can you raise a civilized child when you have been treated this way? How will it affect future generations? How will it affect the world?

How will affect you?