Child marriages not a religious or cultural issue

AFTER struggling for three days in labour, Fawziya Abdullah Youssef, 12, bled to death. Her baby didn’t survive either. It was later revealed that the Yemeni child bride had suffered even before that. Fawziya’s mother said her daughter’s 23-year-old husband had beaten and even tied her down to have sex with her.

We do not have extreme cases like this being reported about Malaysians but we have read stories about girls being married at a very young age. In 2010, for example, there was a report about an 11-year-old girl who was married off to a 41-year-old man by her father in Kelantan. It wasn’t the fact that she was married at 11 that made the news but that she was found starving and barely conscious in a mosque two weeks after their wedding.