Calls To Outlaw Marriage Under Age 18
Sanaa, Yemen —One day last January, 16-year-old Arwa Hassan never came home from school. Almost two months later she was found in the basement of a five-floor hotel where she was forced to work as a prostitute. Yet when police found her, she begged them to take her to prison rather than sending her home.
Police chief Colonel Mohammed Ahmed Najd told the The Media Line Hassan’s story. She met a man named Ahmed, 23, on Facebook a year ago. They planned to marry in the border town of Haradh, and then cross the border illegally into Saudi Arabia.
But things did not go as planned. A Yemeni broker drove the lovers a few miles over the border into Saudi Arabia where they were supposed to meet a Saudi smuggler. But the smuggler demanded $1600 from each of them, much more than they had. When they couldn’t pay, the broker beat Ahmed to the point of unconsciousness.
Hassan was returned to her home in the town of Mukalla, where she will face her family and the local authorities. There have been no reports about Ahmed’s fate.
Hassan is just one of hundreds of Yemeni girls, most of them teenagers, who have eloped over the past year. According to recent statistics, 371 girls were reported missing from seven Yemeni provinces. Most of the missing girls were between 13 and 25, and ran away with men their families would not approve of.
The girls leave because they fall in love, to escape poverty or to flee domestic violence say activists trying to fight human trafficking. Their fate is often similar to Hassan’s.
“When things go wrong out there –with the girls who eloped – they make easy targets for human traffickers, pimps or drug sellers,” Nabeel Fadhel, the president of the Yemen Organization for Fighting Human Trafficking.
In most cases, the families will say that the girl who eloped was kidnapped, but Fadhel says that is rarely the case.
While many girls are believed to have been “abducted”, the chief of Sana’a’s Criminal Investigation Department Colonel Abdussalam Abu al-Rejal confirmed that only one of the cases in the capital was proved to be an abduction incident.
“One out of the 128 cases in Sana’a was a kidnapping case,” Abu al-Rejal told The Media Line, adding that “when a girl runs away out of love, her family will immediately say she has been kidnapped so as to cover themselves against the disgrace she brought on them.”
Yemenis live in a highly tribal and conservative society, where ‘honor killing’ seems to be the only solution to contain the issues of elopement. Several girls who eloped, were reportedly slain by their families, while the whereabouts of several others remain unknown to date.
A 17-year – old girl in Sana’a, who the Yemen Organization for Fighting Human Traffickers, had returned to her family – was reportedly killed.
“The girl was pushed out of the fourth floor of her family’s house two days after she was brought back,” Nabeel Fadhel told The Media Line. “Despite the eyewitnesses, the local authorities in Sana’a closed the files, leaving the case unsolved and uninvestigated.”
Girls in Yemen often get married very young. United Nations data says that more than half of Yemeni girls are married before age 18, often to much older men. Some 14 percent are married before age 15. According to Human Rights Watch, girls who marry young are more likely to drop out of school, to die in childbirth and face a higher risk of physical and sexual abuse.
Yemeni officials are currently considering a law that would prohibit marriage for girls under age 18, and make involvement in underage marriage a criminal offense.
“The draft minimum age law is a real beacon of hope for the thousands of Yemeni girls vulnerable to being married off while still children,” Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch wrote in a recent report. “The government should act quickly on this measure and develop enforcement mechanisms to prevent even more girls from becoming victims of early and forced marriage.”
In January, the National Dialogue Conference, which was created to try to write a new constitution for Yemen, recommended the draft law regulating marriage age.