Benjamin Joffe-Walt 

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, January 23, 2010 – Saudi women's rights advocates are outraged after a 12-year-old girl was sold by her father into marriage with an 80-year-old man.

A Saudi father, whose name has not been released, sold his 12-year-old daughter to his 80-year old cousin for the equivalent of $22,600. The elderly man, who lives in the city of Buraidah, stands accused of raping the girl after the wedding. He has previously married three other young girls.

"She was raped and they took her to the hospital after the wedding night," Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, a Saudi journalist who has been banned from reporting by the government told The Media Line. "Usually when the girl is very young, the authorities tell the husband not to touch her until after puberty. When he was interviewed, the guy just said she was old enough and he didn't know she would get hurt."

The girl, already in the custody of the elderly man, was reported to have shouted "I don’t want him, save me!" when contacted by phone by a journalist from the Al Riyadh, a local newspaper in the Saudi capital.

The girl's mother, who had objected strongly to the marriage, took the case to local media after her lawyer's efforts to get it legally annulled failed.

After the case was publicized, the public prosecutor of Al-Qassim Province is said to have set up a special committee to look into the case.

"They say they're going to look into it but nothing will really happen," Eman Al Nafjan, a Saudi blogger and women's rights advocate told The Media Line. "Even if they solve this case, they are not going to recommend a new law to the king. We should set a legal minimum age at which girls can be married."

"Without a law we get people like this 80 year old guy who takes advantage of the system to fulfill his sick obsession with little girls," she wrote on her blog. "Where else in the world can a man openly say that he is in a polygamous marriage with four underage girls and not get arrested? At this rate we might as well start a tourism industry to attract rich Muslim pedophiles."

The girl's parents are divorced and the marriage is understood to have been arranged on the initiative of the father, who told the local newspaper that he did so on the basis of the girl's physical development, not her age.

"This is not at all unique," said Al Nafjan, who has written extensively about similar cases. "In all the cases that have gotten the attention of local newspapers it was because either the mother or an aunt made an issue of it."

"Girls are seen as very risky in Saudi Arabia because they can later shame the family name by sleeping with someone," she explained. "So families often marry off their girls at a young age so they can't shame the family."

"It's particularly common in cases when you have people from the lower economic status who get divorced," Al Nafjan said. "The father usually wants to keep the boys, because culturally they are not seen as risky, and doesn't want to give the daughters to the mother out of spite, so he just marries them off to the first person who'll pay."

The girl currently attends school during the week, when she lives with her father, and spends weekends with her elderly husband at his home out in the desert outside the city.

The 80-year-old husband told local journalists that he had tried to do the right thing by inviting his new mother-in-law (the girl's mother) to the wedding but she cursed at him in response.

When asked by the mother's lawyer and the Al Riyadh newspaper why he had agreed to the marriage, the officiator stated that he was under the impression that the bride was 13 and a half years old.

Child marriages in Saudi Arabia have made international news a number of times over the past year. In April there was international outcry when a Saudi judge refused to grant a divorce to an eight-year-old girl who had been married off by her father to a 47-year-old man as part of a loan repayment agreement, and in August a 10-year-old bride ran away from her 80-year-old husband and sought refuge at her aunt's house. After ten days in hiding, the girl was returned to her husband by her father.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Saudi Arabia has signed and ratified, defines a child as any person under the age of 18 and Article 16.2 of The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, states that "The marriage of a child shall have no legal effect, and all necessary action, including legislation, shall be taken to specify a minimum age for marriage and to make the registration of marriages in an official registry compulsory."

Saudi Arabia, which ratified the convention in September 2000, did so with the stated reservation that "In case of contradiction between any term of the Convention and the norms of Islamic law, the Kingdom is not under obligation to observe the contradictory terms of the Convention."

Nadya Khalife, Women's Rights researcher for Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division, said Saudi Arabia should set a legal age for marriage.

"We call on all governments to ensure that they have a legal age of marriage," she told The Media Line. "Working from a human rights framework, we believe that early marriage has negative consequences on children, especially girls because it effects their health, education, literacy and economic empowerment skills. The reason we focus on girls is because it is principally girls who are married off at a young age."

Saudi Arabia's religious leadership defends child marriages, often citing the marriage by Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullāh, the founder of Islam, to Aisha bint Abu Bakr, when according to traditional Islamic texts she was six or seven years old. Aisha stayed with her parents for a few years after the marriage, according to most sources, moving in with Muhammad and consummating the marriage when she was nine. Aisha was Muhammad's third of 13 wives or concubines.

Al Nafjan rejects using Aisha as a basis for justifying child marriages.

"It's not allowed in Islam to marry off children," she said. "There is nothing in the Koran that states that children should be married off."

Al-Huwaidar agreed.

"Whatever their religious justification, this is just a way of legally justifying the rape of little girls," she said. "Modern Muslim scholars dispute Aisha's age at the time of marriage, but even if Muhammad got married to Aisha when she was nine, that does not justify applying the same standards to today."

Source: The Media Line, January 21, 2010

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