Child Brides - Tradition or State Sanctioned Rape?

[Martina]

Originally Posted by Words

The US, in spite of having laws that make having sex with a minor a criminal offence, has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the entire industrialized world with a not insignificant number of pregnancies involving girls as young as ten or eleven.

Perhaps, then, while we're expressing our outrage - again - at what happens in the Middle East, we could ask ourselves why it is that it's the 'state sanctioned' aspect of certain things that we find so abominable and worthy of discussion and not 'the things' themselves.

Words

You make a good point. There is an article in this week's Time Magazine about the Catholic Church, saying the fact that there are so few women in the hierarchy has meant that they have had a very different (and lesser) interest in child welfare. That's a western institution.

i think that the U.S. is not a bastion of human rights. So not. Look at our prisons. We allow amazing amounts of child poverty. Child prostitution is rampant. Yes, we need to look at ourselves too.

That should not stop us from calling murder, rape and oppression what they are wherever they are.

This is a link to Nicholas Kristof's page on the NYTimes.

LINK

Here is one to a brief piece on Yemen - a few days before the other story broke, i think. LINK