India’s Supreme Court has eliminated a law that allowed men to have sex with underage girls if they were married to them, an important step forward in eliminating sexual exploitation in that country.
Spain recently raised its minimum age for marriage from 14 to 16, and also upped the age for consent from 13 to 16. The BBC said last Thursday that, while only 365 marriages involving people under the age of 16 have occurred in Spain since 2000, there were 2,678 such marriages in the ‘90s and 12,867 in the ‘80s.
When Nigerian 14-year-old Wasila Umaru was forced into a marriage with a 35-year-old man, she was terrified and didn't know what to do. In this state of emergency she did the only thing she could think of: she poisoned her husband in the hopes that she would not have to share her body or her life with him, a man whom…
Today, October 11, 2012, heralds the first International Day of the Girl Child, which the United Nations Population Fund, working in concert with VII Photo, will observe with an exhibition at the United Nations Headquarters in New York featuring photography and video productions from Jessica Dimmock and Stephanie…
Laxmi Sargara, an 18-year-old girl from India who was entered into an arranged marriage when she was just a year old, made the brave decision to fight against her forced union, and now she's won an annulment. While child marriages are technically illegal in India, many families in rural communities still engage in…
One of the first studies to look at child marriage and mental health has found that American women who married before age 18 are at increased risk of psychological problems.
Inspired in part by Rekha Kalindi, increasing numbers of young Indian girls are refusing to submit to child marriage. As an article in today's Los Angeles Times makes clear, no small feat:
An 8-year-old Saudi girl, whose mother petitioned for a divorce after her father married her off to a 50-year-old friend, has been granted an annulment after the husband "agreed" the marriage wasn't legal. [BBC]
