Child Brides - Tradition or State Sanctioned Rape?

[Rufusboi]

Originally Posted by Corkey

It's a explicitly hypocritical of the US based culture to try to tell another culture what they can and can not practice. Anyone remember the children of Native America and how their culture was changed to match what white americia wanted them to be. Massive failure.

Personally for me it would be rape, abuse, and not acceptable. But I don't live there, I wasn't raised in their culture to be able to speak to the issue (for) them. My sunglasses aren't rose tinted, our own history is full of this patriarchy.

On the one hand I think you are right that we have to be careful about one culture telling another culture what they can and cannot do. On the other hand their are many women and girls fighting this tradition. Is it their fight only and we should just butt out and watch from the sidelines?

For me, a 10 or 12 year having sex with an adult male isn't just rape it is legal pedophilia. I can't imagine why an adult man would want to have sex with a 10 year old child.

I often think it is easy to call something like this tradition in order to get other countries to back off. Yet it seems that many of these "traditions" seem to hurt women and girls both physcially and psychologically.

I can't even think of one tradition that negatively impacts the physical, sexual, mental, and emotional health of boys and men on a wide reaching cultural level. Perhaps there are/were some but nothing is coming to mind right now.

Why are child brides almost always female married to adult males? Why are girls in FLDS communities married at super young ages but not the boys. What age are the boys generally married at come to think of it. I don't recall ever reading anything about this? Would we view this differently if a 15 year old girl were married to a 15 year old boy rather than a man in his 40s, 50s, or 60s? What does a girl of 15 think about being married to a man in his 50s. Has anyone even asked her?

Why is genital multilation performed on young girls but not young boys in the countries that habitually practice FGM? A lot of this is not so much rooted in cultural and religious traditions but in attitudes toward women, women's bodies, sex, ownership, ecomomics, defintions of chastity, and reproduction.


Rufus