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Mary Carol

15-12-04, 02:15 AM

Part 1 of 2 Parts

The Bride Was 7

In the heart of Ethiopia, child marriage takes a brutal toll

By Paul Salopek
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published December 12, 2004

THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS OF ETHIOPIA -- Tihun Nebiyu the goat herder doesn't want to marry. She is adamant about this. But in her village nobody heeds the opinions of headstrong little girls.

That's why she's kneeling in the filigreed shade of her favorite thorn tree, dropping beetles down her dress. Magic beetles.

"When they bite you here--" Tihun explains gravely, pressing the scrabbling insects into her chest through the fabric of her tattered smock "--it makes your breasts grow."

This is Tihun's own wishful brand of sorcery--a child's desperate measure to turn herself into an adult. Then maybe, just maybe, her family would respect her wishes not to wed. She could rebuff the strange man her papa has chosen to be her husband. And she wouldn't have to bear his dumb babies.

Tihun kneels in the dirt, eyes closed: an elfin figure whose smile is made goofily endearing by two missing front teeth. She holds her small hands over her nipples. She is waiting for the bugs' enchantment to start. Seconds pass. But nothing happens. Eventually, she starts to giggle. The beetles have escaped--by crawling up her neck.

"It doesn't work!" Tihun says, disgusted. She heaves an exaggerated sigh and squints out across the yellow-grass hills surrounding her world: "I will just have to run."

But this is childish bluster. Tihun's short legs can't carry her away fast enough from the death of her childhood. Her wedding is five days away. And she is 7 years old.

There are, according to child-rights activists, an estimated 50 million Tihuns scattered across the world: young teen or even preteen girls whose innocence is being sacrificed to arranged marriages, often with older men.

Coerced by family and culture into lives of servility and isolation, and scarred by the trauma of too-early pregnancy, child brides represent a vast, lost generation of children.

While humanitarian campaigns have focused global attention on childhood AIDS in Africa, female genital mutilation and child labor, one of the underlying sources of all these woes remains largely ignored. Child marriage, an ancient, entrenched practice long hidden in shadow, was only denounced by the United Nations as a serious human-rights violation in 2001.

"This is a big, tough, complicated issue," concedes Abebe Kebede, a leading Ethiopian social worker.

"It hasn't been highlighted that much because marriage is viewed positively in almost every culture," Kebede says. "Who wants to tackle that? Never mind that the consequences for kids--and whole nations--are pretty disastrous."

The most brutal toll is medical: Early pregnancies are the leading cause of death for girls age 15 to 19 in the developing world, says the UN. And medical relief groups believe that at least 2 million women worldwide are currently living with gruesome vaginal and anal ruptures, called fistulas, that result from bearing children much too young. Untreated fistulas can be fatal, and survivors are usually left incontinent for life.

But child marriage ruins lives in other ways too. Often treated like indentured servants, young brides are subject to beatings by their grown husbands and in-laws. And thousands of girls end up trapped in the sex trade, whether through organized child bride trafficking rings in countries such as China or, in Africa, by simply drifting from abusive marriages into street prostitution, social workers say.

The most far-reaching injustice of child marriage by far, however, is probably its most subtle: It pries millions of young girls out of school. Confined to their husbands' homes, and cheated of the benefits of education, legions of demoralized children worldwide are condemned to lives of ignorance and dire poverty from which they rarely escape, and which they endure with numbed desperation.

"That's the most heartbreaking thing about this issue," says Micol Zarb, a spokeswoman for the UN Population Fund, or UNFPA, which monitors global reproductive health. "All the misery and pain is occurring in silence. These are just kids. They don't speak out. We never hear from them."

According to the UNFPA, at least 49 countries in the world, roughly a quarter of all nations, face a significant child bride problem--that is, at least 15 percent of their girls marry younger than age 18, the widely recognized threshold of adulthood.

Not surprisingly, the epicenters of child wedlock are sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where cementing clan ties through marriage, a preoccupation with bridal virginity and fear of contracting AIDS are strongest.

Ethiopia is one such hot spot. Its government, pressured by aid organizations, has started prohibiting early marriages. Yet the tradition is hard to stamp out.

Among Ethiopia's rural Amhara people--a culture of warrior-farmers in which a staggering 82 percent of all brides are underage--the drumming and tribal dancing that enliven child weddings can still be heard echoing through the mountain nights. Only it is a bit muffled these days: The grooms and their tiny, bewildered brides--cocooned in white cloth--simply have moved their nuptials indoors.

This is the story of just one child bride, Tihun, the whimsical goatherd.

Born into the Amhara ethnic group, she sings nonsense songs in breathy Amharic in a remote valley filled with plowed fields and blackbirds, high in the rugged Horn of Africa. And in the last childhood summer of her life, she still believed in the liberating power of magic.

In Amharaland

Tihun's world is gorgeous and cruel.

It is the golden month of May. With its straw-colored hills, toga-draped shepherds and loaf-like volcanic buttes jutting to 7,000 feet, the remote homeland of some 16 million Amharas looks like a landscape straight out of J.R.R. Tolkien's fable "The Hobbit"--the ethereal Africa of dreams.

But conversations with the shy children in the region reveal a disconcerting fact: Virtually every little girl in sight--whether carrying a bundle of firewood or racing across lumpy fields--is already spoken for. The 11-year-old buying sweets at a village market is somebody's wife. Two girls playing an elaborate Ethiopian version of hopscotch in the dust are soon to be brides. And a scrawny 5th grader skipping home from school is already divorced. Divorce, though frowned upon, can occur when families feud.

Amharaland has the highest child marriage rates in the world, according to UN and Ethiopian statistics; in some dusty corners of the ancient highlands, almost 90 percent of the local girls are married before age 15.

The forces behind this startling demographic are at work in all child bride cultures--just taken to extremes in the heart of Ethiopia.

Local poverty is wrenching. Barefoot children sprint after passing cars to beg for garbage--especially the disposable water bottles tossed out by foreign aid workers, which are coveted over the villagers' heavy clay jugs.

The highland rains are erratic. Famine haunts the cooking fires. And because daughters rarely inherit fertile lands, keeping them at home and feeding them are considered a folly. Better to marry them off quickly, the logic of survival goes, to strengthen family alliances for the lean times.

The Amharas' demands for bridal virginity, meanwhile, can be fanatical. Anxious parents push their daughters into wedlock years before puberty because they fear the onset of menstruation may be mistaken for the taboo of premarital sex.

And the powerful Ethiopian Orthodox Church has long played a role in early matchmaking. Church teachings traditionally encouraged marriage before age 15, declaring that this was the age of the Virgin Mary at the Immaculate Conception of Christ.

"During these times we have started to advocate against that idea," says Simia Kone Melak, a bearded priest at one of the hundreds of rock-walled monasteries dotting Amhara country. "The government has told us that child marriage is wrong. So we are telling families to wait."

Yet priests continue to bless early marriages. And the new message butts up against centuries of younger-is-better belief.

"In truth, if a girl reaches 13, she is already too old to be married," declares Nebiyu Melese, 54, Tihun's wiry farmer father. "I know some people say this is uncivilized. But they don't live here. So how can they judge?"

Tough, opinionated Melese, his sad-eyed wife, Beyenech Alem, 45, and their seven children are traditional Amharas in many ways. They plant millet and corn, and sleep next to their goats in a mud-walled house infested with ticks and fleas.

But just as families vary in American suburbia, so they do in African villages. Tihun was born into a gruff, noisy household--the clan's squabbles reverberate across fields 50 yards away. A pious and conservative patriarch, Melese disdains schooling for his girls and brooks no resistance to early marriage.

To save on wedding expenses, he has shrewdly arranged to marry off four of his children on the same day. Tihun and her more worldly big sister Dinke, 10, will be carted away on horses by strangers who are their husbands. And two teenage sons will bring home 10-year-old brides.

For Tihun, Melese has scored a minor coup: a deacon in the Orthodox Church.

"He has a good lemon orchard," Melese says approvingly.

It never occurs to the stern old man to consult his youngest daughter on these decisions. Unless issuing orders, he never speaks to her at all.

This isn't coldheartedness. It is a form of emotional self-preservation on the harsher edges of the world--a place where one out of five children die before reaching the age of 5.

Tricked by life

Tihun is sulking.

It is three days before her wedding. She sits with her legs akimbo under the thorn tree, passing time with her 6-year-old pal Mulusaw. Two bony girls in rag dresses. They play an Amhara version of jacks--tossing and catching small pebbles.

"I would rather be eaten by a hyena than marry that person," Tihun complains of her unknown fiance. "Nobody ever listens to me!"

Today she has given up on magic as her means of salvation. As the wedding ceremony approaches, she grows withdrawn. She whispers sullenly that she might be better off dead.

Mulusaw nods in sympathy. She will be betrothed next year. But to a 6-year-old, that is an eternity away.

Soon Tihun and Mulusaw are laughing--wrestling in the packed dust. Tihun forgets about her future. She forgets to keep an eye on her goats. The bucktoothed animals invade the family's potato patch. And furious shouts erupt from the farmhouse.

"Tihun is careless," says Mintiwab, 22, Tihun's eldest sister, who was abandoned by her husband and lives at home. "She is always in trouble."

And it's true. Tihun is an incompetent farm laborer. Easily bored, prone to daydreaming, she is distracted by odd-shaped rocks in the fields, slow-moving insects and the flocks of pied crows racing like pepper grains across the sunlit sky.

Her marauding animals ravage many potato seedlings. Later, Mintiwab beats Tihun with a switch. Arms and bare feet pumping, the little girl runs off screeching into the fields, her face contorted more by surprise than pain--as if somehow tricked by life again.

An exotic refuge

One of Tihun's secret diversions is watching village children walk home from school. She nudges her unruly goats to a hilltop overlooking the Chinese-built road where they come trudging--platoons of boys and girls in patched clothes. Tihun gapes at them in awe. Her head cocked sideways on her scrawny neck. Blinking in silence.

Does she want to attend school? Of course. Why? She cannot say. School is something mysterious. Exotic. Students are elite beings. They have special possessions--a tattered government workbook. (They share old pencil stubs.) But her papa has allowed only one older brother to enroll. And Tihun must fill his job as a herder.

In Ethiopia, education is mandatory for both sexes until the 6th grade. But in Tihun's remote valley, many families keep their girls at home through their school-age years to tap their farm labor. Parents also fear for their daughters' virginity at the mud-and-wattle schoolhouse 3 miles away.

Child-rights workers worldwide agree that education is the single most important key unlocking the prison of child marriage.

Essential for enhancing a girl's income potential--and for broadening her horizons--schoolwork also gives her body time to mature before the rigors of childbirth.

"It's the key reason the practice is declining in the places where it's declining," says Kathleen Kurz, an analyst with the non-governmental International Center for Research on Women in Washington. "Convincing parents of the benefits of schooling works far better than just banning child marriage outright."

In countries such as India, secondary education has slashed child marriage rates by up to two-thirds. And across the developing world, girls who complete primary school tend to marry four years later and have on average two fewer children, UN surveys show.

In the smoky villages of rural Ethiopia--some of the least educated communities in the world--the girls who step into crude schoolrooms are revolutionaries in braids.

"I only remember my marriage like a dream," says Zigiju Mola, 12, an Amhara 5th grader who was married at 6 but who stubbornly persuaded her parents to continue paying her school fees.

"I also give my husband courage to attend school," says Zigiju, a precocious girl with tattooed beauty marks on her cheeks. "He wants to keep an eye on me and not be left behind."

Her husband, an embarrassed-looking youth of 18, scrunches behind his 2nd-grade plank desk in the same dirt-floored school.

Scores of girls at the school are child brides.

"That's exactly why conservative parents distrust education," says Banchalem Addis, one of the handful of women teachers in Amharaland. "Most pupils never want to go back to the farm and be their mother-in-laws' slaves."

The runaways

Some 150 miles from Tihun's valley, in a working-class neighborhood of Addis Ababa, the teeming Ethiopian capital, a strange, creaking metal structure towers over the houses: a multistory homeless shelter made from stacked shipping containers.

Erected by a local humanitarian project called Godanaw, the shelter has provided skills training and health care to some 1,200 street girls--three-quarters of them escapees from early marriages in the countryside.

"I don't ever want to be touched by a man again," says glassy-eyed Alem Siraj, 19, who straggled into the rickety structure with her 5-month-old baby, Nebiyu.

Siraj walked out of her arranged marriage in the highlands when she was 14, rode a bus to Addis Ababa, found work as a maid and was raped, she says, by her employer--the father of her son. She was fired when her pregnancy showed, Siraj says.

Like tens of thousands of other outcasts from early marriage, she can never go home. But life could get worse. Countless runaways like her end up mired in the sex trade.

The northern town of Bahar Dar is one such trap for the vulnerable flotsam of Ethiopia's child marriages.

Bars hawking millet beer, or tela, line the dingy streets. After dark, small girls can be seen wiping tables, carrying glasses or lounging by doorways that gush blue light and Ethiopian pop music at cruising cars. At one establishment, a shy, teen bar girl named Belayinesh describes in a monotone her flight from an arranged marriage and her battered hope "that someone here will help me."

"AIDS awaits her," says Teshone Belete, a social worker visiting the bar on his rounds through the back alleys of the city. "She will be dead in five years."

The plagues of HIV and child marriage go hand in hand throughout the developing world.

Even those young brides not forced into prostitution usually end up with higher-than-average infection rates. Research by the non-profit Population Council shows that because their husbands are older, often sexually experienced and possibly carrying the virus already, child wives are more at risk of AIDS than single girls their age.

Tragically, the infection rates of child brides in Africa are pumped even higher by the spreading folk belief that sex with virgin girls can cure AIDS. In Ethiopia, according to the UN, 6 out of 10 new HIV cases are found in girls under 24.

Sewareg Debas, 18, is aware of this risk.

A striking Amhara bar girl with long braided hair, she was forced to drop out of the 8th grade for an arranged marriage. As she tells her familiar story inside a parked car, a mob of red-eyed drunks spills out of her employer's saloon. Slurring their words, they jeer her for speaking to strangers. They pound belligerently on the rolled-up car windows. A large crowd of curious onlookers assembles. Debas falls silent. Terrified, she stares mutely into her lap.

This happens in the village of Meshenti, on the Chinese road to Tihun's farm.

Trinkets and plastic shoes

Tihun is dazzled.

Mintiwab has brought home a fabulous treasure: Tihun's wedding gown. A simple cotton dress patterned with flowers. Tihun can't tear her eyes from it, cannot stop touching it. And there is more. A pair of plastic slippers. A grown-up's woven shawl. Some cheap bangles. Beads and trinkets.

Tihun yanks on this magnificent finery and skitters around the family hut. For the first time in her life, the center of attention. A woman in miniature. She marries tomorrow.

Yezare amete, yemamushe enate: "By this time next year, the mother of a son."

For all Amharas, this wedding song is unambiguous. A girl's highest function is to produce boys--quickly and often. Starting, on average, at age 14, an Amhara girl will give birth every year for 15 years. She will be left with seven surviving children, Ethiopia's national average.

Tihun will not be forced to have sex for a couple of years. (This is tacitly agreed upon by the two families.) But when the time comes--usually no later than age 12--her jubilant husband will carry a bloodstained sheet like a pennant to her parents.

For millions of other child brides, initiations into sex can be even more traumatic.

Among the minority Gurage people of Ethiopia, pubescent brides are typically "softened up" with natural purgatives and fasting, and their fingernails are clipped. On the night of the wedding, the groom forces himself on his weakened wife. She is expected to resist. Cheers erupt outside the nuptial hut when news of the consummation reaches the wedding guests.

On extremely rare occasions, the children meet violence with violence.

Among the Oromo people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, for example, there is the notorious practice of "marriage by abduction." In this case, there is no consent whatever: A groom secures a bride by kidnapping and raping a girl he fancies. Her robbed virginity becomes the basis of marriage.

This tribal custom made headlines in Ethiopia when a 14-year-old schoolgirl shot dead her rapist and would-be husband with an AK-47 assault rifle. She was acquitted of murder, to the astonishment of the conservative public. A women's rights group in the country called the verdict "a revolution against male culture."

Tihun has no inkling of what awaits her.

"I won't tell her," whispers Alem, her stooped old mother, who married at 10. "It is our custom that she experience it on her own."

Tihun minces about in her plastic slippers all afternoon. The new shoes blister her untamed feet. But she is too giddy to care. And she no longer plans to escape her wedding.

``The ultimate pariahs'

There is a hospital in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, where you must breathe through your mouth.

The reek of feces and urine mixed with disinfectant is dizzying. Footprint-shaped stains of human waste lead from the sunny, white-tiled wards to a secluded garden outside. These are the tracks of the patients--women and girls whose reproductive tissues have been horribly ripped apart by too-early childbirth. Meekly clutching towels about their waists, leaking constantly, they stagger under the trees, sucking in fresh air.

The Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital may look like the darkest dead end of the child bride experience.

But in truth, only the lucky come here. For every one of the 1,200 girls who are operated on yearly for fistulas--the term for the ruptures caused by too-big babies' heads blocking too-small pelvises--there are at least 10 others left untreated in the bush.

According to the UN Population Fund, some 2 million women worldwide suffer the devastating ailment. About 50,000 to 100,000 new cases emerge annually, perhaps 10,000 of them in Ethiopia alone. Thousands of fistula victims die untended in their remote villages. Nobody really knows the number.

"These girls are the ultimate pariahs," says Ruth Kennedy, an American midwife who helps manage the charity hospital. "Imagine stinking and staining up things, and drawing flies. Husbands and families disown them. They end up as beggars or hermits."

Like many people who grapple with human suffering every day, Kennedy hides her empathy behind a facade of brusque, no-nonsense efficiency.

She strides down the hospital's incessantly mopped halls, rattling off practical solutions to the scourge of early pregnancy. Like keeping the pressure on the Orthodox Church to preach more strenuously against child marriage. Or opening all-girls schools to convince skeptical parents that their daughters' virginity will be shielded from male students. Or simply building more roads in the rugged interior to speed pregnant girls to medical care more quickly.

She has little time for well-meaning campaigns by outside humanitarian groups.

"You know, foreign donors come here and lecture the Ethiopians, `You must protect these poor, oppressed children and stamp out early marriage,'" Kennedy says. "But what about our own 13-year-old daughters in America and Europe who are having sex with multiple partners? We're handing out condoms in schools. So it's pretty hypocritical, isn't it?"

Mostly, though, she just tells stories.

Such as: "There was this beautiful 16-year-old Afar girl. She suffered terrible, terrible injuries. She had been in labor for four days. The baby died. She squeezed it out as a piece of dead meat."

Or: "One girl gave birth to six dead babies in a row. The sixth finally gave her a fistula."

Or: "One mother was carried here for 2 1/2 days by her 18-year-old son. He had urine and feces streaming down his back. That is love."

Feast and celebration

Tihun hasn't spoken all day.

Her husband arrived at midnight, as prescribed by Amhara custom, with an escort of nine best friends. He is Ayalew, an Orthodox Church deacon of 17, handsome, regal, wrapped in a dazzling white robe and sheltered from the sky by a large red umbrella. He barely speaks.

"Oh! Miss Tihun," his best man proclaims in a formal wedding address, "you are very lucky! Having a priest to marry, God picked you like Virgin Mary!"

Scores of neighbors arrive to join in a feast of sour injera bread and goat meat. Millet beer flows by the barrelful. Dozens of dancers steam up the cramped air inside the family hut. Cow-horn trumpets and skin drums reverberate far into the next starlit night.

Melese doesn't care if the government fines him 100 birr, or $12, for breaking Ethiopia's new civil codes, which stipulate a minimum legal marrying age of 18 for girls. Bustling about among the milling guests like an anxious maitre d', he urges them to sing louder. He wants to announce the weddings of his two boys and girls to the world.

Tihun has been bathed with a wet rag. Her head has been shaved and she wears her prized dress. Huddled with her sister Dinke in a corner of the cavelike hut, she watches the amazements of her marriage ceremony pinwheel about her. Preternaturally still. Narcotized by sleeplessness--by fasting that, according to tradition, will calm her. Mulusaw, her inseparable friend, lies next to her to provide comfort.

With the formal marriage request to old Melese over, there is no further elaborate ritual. The celebration flows. Tihun and her new husband never exchange a word.

By dawn the next morning she is gone, carried off to her in-laws' farm on a horse caparisoned with tin bells and red velvet. The groomsmen tote her in their arms from the hut to the saddle; during her wedding, her feet must never touch the ground.

"She didn't cry when she left, which is good," Melese says later, bleary-eyed but proud under Tihun's thorn tree. "She really didn't know where she was going."

Melese has staggered to the tree to guard the all-important family fields from goats. He waits for one of his unmarried children to relieve him.

The dust under the tree still bears Tihun's tiny footprints. And the rocks she used as jacks. Ephemeral reminders of a childhood, they will be blown away in the next windstorm.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The reporting team

Foreign correspondent Paul Salopek has covered Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia. His reporting in the U.S. and abroad has captured two Pulitzer Prizes.

Photographer Heather Stone has traveled throughout the U.S. and abroad for a variety of assignments, including the Olympics and Yasser Arafat's funeral. She has won many national photo awards.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0412120360dec12,1,365565.story

Mary Carol

15-12-04, 02:19 AM

Part 2 of 2 Parts

Delaying Marriage Gets Passing Grade

In rural Egypt, special program empowers girls to be students before brides

By Christine Spolar
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published December 13, 2004

DAQUF, Egypt -- The girls in this village near the languid waters of the Nile were always told they could do no better than to marry young, as early as 11, no later than 16.

Shy, dark-eyed Um Kalthoum Hassan was rarely allowed to step beyond the threshold of her home. Nora Abdullah, a teenager with rough hands and broad shoulders, was sent to the cotton fields as her brothers went to school. Nasra Jamal begged off her first marriage proposal at age 13, but she feared it was only a matter of time before she became a bride

Eventually they and four dozen other girls considered to be near marrying age -- illiterate and seemingly unremarkable 13- and 14-year-olds -- embarked on a small, brave experiment that questioned how and why girls are made into brides. In this farming community 120 miles south of Cairo, the youngsters were immersed, over 2 1/2 years, in six years' worth of study and buffeted by far more than ABCs.

Ping-pong was on the agenda. So was electrical wiring and cooking, with each girl learning to pull apart a light socket and, as importantly, finesse a smooth tomato puree.

Soon the girls were challenged by other mysteries of life. Did they know the names of their own body parts? What were they used for? Was pregnancy something that their bony hips, flat chests and teenage brains could handle?

School suddenly crystallized, in their words, as salvation. "No one ever explained reproduction before," said Nora Abdullah, now 18. "Women are just expected to have babies. . . . Then they have all these children and they have to marry them off to get rid of the burden.

"I would've been married without this class," she said, in Arabic. "We all would have. . . . There are still parents who want to get us married."

Child marriage exists almost everywhere in the world, but slums and rural areas of developing countries produce some of the most luckless young brides. Daquf's girls were part of a fresh and holistic approach to changing possibilities and expectations of adolescent girls and their families in rural Egypt.

The web of programs launched in 2001--based in literacy, sports, life skills education and family seminars--is being examined as a possible model for the rest of Egypt and other troubled spots to ensure that childhood doesn't end in forced marriage.

In many countries, social workers have combated child marriage through education programs. India, for instance, has focused on keeping girls in school with the idea that a one- or two-year delay in marriage has a positive effect on their health.

Still, even with a broad government effort, girls often do not find support within their families to remain in school. Unless families and communities are pulled in to help preserve a girl's childhood, there are powerful religious, cultural and economic forces that can overwhelm any girl.

"We're talking about married girls, not married women," said Judith Bruce, a program director at the Population Council, an international policy research group. "When you consider the health consequences and the human cost, this is probably the largest human-rights abuse you could name."

Girls wed as young as 7 have little say in when or whom they marry. Deemed women once they are made wives, the girls no longer, if they ever did, attend school. They rarely have access to contraception. More to the point, they usually have no inkling of why they might want contraceptives anyway. A good wife should give birth in the first year of marriage, and, often married to older men, the girls must succumb to all sexual demands.

The problems attributed to child marriage are well-documented. Teen brides die during pregnancy and in childbirth at double the rate of women in their 20s. Girls pregnant by age 10 to 14 are five times more likely to die than women twice their age. Babies borne by girls are sicker, weaker and less likely to survive childhood. Girls with older, experienced husbands suffer sexually transmitted diseases at a galloping rate, so high that they now make up a population highly vulnerable to the AIDS virus.

This month, top AIDS experts warned that India, where child brides still abound within the billion-plus population, is on the brink of having an epidemic parallel to those in Africa.

None of this is exactly news in Cairo, New Delhi or Addis Ababa, where laws limit the age of marriage to 16 in the case of Egypt, and 18 in India and Ethiopia. But such laws are routinely ignored among the poor and the least educated.

Poverty, outright gender prejudice--girls are less valued than boys--and fears about a girl's virginity often are the stated reasons for early marriage. Cultural bonds are so strong that even countries with strict child protections have seen forced marriage emerge among immigrants from Pakistan, India and the Middle East.

British officials have been forced to deal with the problem on two fronts. Girls are being spirited out of Britain as underage brides, but, increasingly, illegal weddings are also taking place secretly in Britain. The Pakistani or Bangladeshi girls involved are daughters of immigrants, but they themselves are British nationals needing protection.

"It's not as if this is a shocking Third World thing," London caseworker Heather Harvey said. "It's not foreign. It's here."

This month, ministers from across Europe and experts from UN agencies met in Sweden to define strategies to combat increasing incidents of forced marriage. In the United States, Sen. **** Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, is sponsoring legislation to create an office in the State Department to address child marriage.

Snapshot of early marriage

The backwaters of Egypt provide a snapshot of why and how the practice endures. In contrast to more urban areas of the country, where the average age for marriage is rising, these villages still are home to child brides and forced unions.

Daquf is just a 45-minute drive from Minya, a university city of 4 million people, yet its dirt-poor villagers rely on donkey carts and scythes to eke out a living from its green fields and dark soil. Children and marriage are among the few tangible signs of success. In the village of 20,000, one priest estimates that about 70 percent of the girls marry before 18.

But there were glimmers of possibilities in Daquf and three other nearby villages that research groups, and increasingly the government, found intriguing.

All the villages had literacy classes, if somewhat haphazard, that indicated an interest in educating girls. All had sports centers that adhered to new standards from Cairo to create girls-only hours. And prominent community and religious leaders, in conversations with private agencies, seemed willing to address the problem of early marriage.

"I walk around the village and I see a girl only so tall with a baby," said Hilal Mohammed Hassan, a father of four and bakery inspector for the government who devotes long hours to community projects. "I don't claim to know a lot, but you have to wonder how a girl can handle a husband, a baby and all the problems of married life."

"We're talking about a forgotten class in Daquf that is ignored in education, health and everything else."

Hassan, 47, was among the first to hear a proposal from aid groups, including Save the Children, Caritas and the Population Council. They would fashion a comprehensive effort to educate as many as 200 girls in the countryside if the community would agree to a few conditions.

The new program--called Safe Spaces for Girls to Learn, Play and Grow--would demand time, 2 1/2 years of intense study. Sports had to be allowed as a way to build confidence and friendship. The girls would work toward specific goals: literacy, delayed marriage and a clear opportunity to advance to public school.

"It was an effort that pushed all of us," said Sheik Ali Wafdy Mohammed, an imam who, along with the village Coptic priest, was deemed crucial to the project's success.

"This was new for us," Mohammed said. "We are an Eastern community and we have our traditions. Early marriage is a tradition. For me to advise parents and families, I had to be convinced. Once we were convinced, we could convince."

The imam and the priest pressed for straight talk from several doctors about how to address common taboos, Hassan said. Initial parent conferences proved that the learning curve would be precipitous. At one point, a group of mothers bolted from a meeting, too embarrassed to sit with men while they spoke about "ugly things," as one woman said.

They were talking about menstruation.

Hassan recalled that Mohammed had to counsel families that it was OK to talk about reproductive health. Mohammed found a way--calling separate meetings with fathers and then mothers--to answer questions from parents. Then another crisis arose. The girls were handed track suits for exercise classes.

No teenage girl in Daquf, where two-thirds of the families are Muslim, had ever worn pants in public. None had ever played on a field or courts where neighborhood boys could see. Another compromise was divined. Unlike boys, girls would not walk from their homes to the sports halls wearing track suits. They would change once they were inside. Time at the sports center was scheduled so boys and girls never crossed paths.

"We don't take risks on sin," Hassan said. "I can improvise on everything but religion here."

Given their illiteracy and age, hundreds of girls could qualify for the program. Two hundred were admitted for the first class, in fall 2001. Almost every one had to argue her way past her parents to enter. In the first month alone, 10 percent dropped out, and attendance was a constant struggle.

Time and again, teachers went door to door to soothe parents' fears.

Rumors spread across the village, and parents worried: Girls would talk about female circumcision--and eventually they did. Girls would play with boys--a fear that never materialized. Girls would not get married if they went to school. That, parents were firmly told, was exactly the point.

"This is not like trying to add nutrition to a child-care program," said Moushira Khattab, secretary general of Egypt's National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, which provided some funds but kept a distance from dictating specifics. "This is going into a community and getting the community to talk about their most neglected population. Nothing was easy."

No one understood that more than the girls.

A chance at education

By 13, Nora Abdullah had lived through back-breaking years of field harvest and housework. There was never a question that her six brothers would attend school. If Nora begged for a chance, her parents argued that schooling a girl was useless. Nora said she began dreaming about what it would be like to read.

When a woman knocked on her door one day and offered the new course, Nora couldn't spell her own name, but she demanded that the woman write something down that would guarantee her a spot.

"I wanted to learn--if only to be able to read my own name," the girl said. "I fought and fought with my parents over this. Even if I had to pay myself, and I don't know how, I wanted to learn how to read."

Her parents were worn down by her arguments. Warily, they sent Nora ahead.

For Nasra Jamal, the rap on the door tapped the same passion. Her parents didn't argue with their oldest daughter so much about the book learning. It was the idea that Nasra would learn how to throw and kick a ball. Volleyball and soccer were in the curriculum. That, they said, could hurt her marriageability.

They, like most parents, held some very firm, and very wrong, beliefs. They thought a girl could lose her virginity--break her hymen--by stretching her legs. They worried she would lose weight, and that would be a problem in the countryside, where men looking for wives like fat women. They also feared that bright-eyed Nasra, gregarious in daily life, would do something shameful in the heat of the game: shout.

Teachers scrambled to save the sports regimen. Soccer was out, ping-pong in. Doctors held parent conferences for four months. Fathers were given permission to watch their daughters at play. Nasra was allowed to attend class.

The coursework was rigorous. The girls had to quickly learn the Arabic alphabet and numbers. They were grilled on the functions of Egyptian government. They had to figure out how to string letters into words and words into sentences, all on paper for their parents to see, to prove that they were worth something.

Even as the girls pursued their class work, they worried that they were not safe from an early marriage. One 14-year-old was married and sent to another village. Other friends and cousins, whose parents forbade them to join the program, were married soon after their first menstrual period.

One day, Nasra, then 15, heard that her parents had an offer of marriage, and she panicked. She raced to the imam's front door and pleaded. Tall and soft-spoken, he persuaded Nasra's parents to give her more time.

Um Kalthoum Hassan was as nervous as anyone about her chances to stay in school. Her father, deeply conservative, had refused to allow any of his children to attend school, and girls were not allowed to stray far from home. To get into the new program, Um Kalthoum, the oldest child, also implored the imam--who happened to be her uncle--for help.

Mohammed spent days and hours discussing the Prophet Muhammad's teachings with his brother. Nothing in the Koran prohibits women from school, and Islam celebrates educated women, he counseled. Um Kalthoum's father agreed, with one caveat: Every night, the girl would teach her eight siblings.

"I took every class seriously," Um Kalthoum said. "Every class was not just learning letters, it was about the issues we live every day. We learned to cook, we learned to make yogurt, we learned how to make sweets. Every day, I came home and taught everyone."

Over time, the girls began calling their school Ishraq, translated roughly from Arabic to mean Illumination or Enlightenment, and with good reason.

In Um Kalthoum's family, the girls proved so able that the father agreed that a younger daughter should join the class. As younger sisters grew to school age, he bent further. They could attend public school.

There were other surprises. Sports gave the girls a confidence they hadn't anticipated. They became more at ease with their bodies. When teachers began seminars on childbearing, a year into the program, there were simmering anxieties. Tough questions arose--and, again, parent conferences were arranged--but the human body was deemed a legitimate course of study.

The girls learned the names of every body part, and, suddenly, periods and pregnancy made sense. Early marriage, they discovered, went against all health advice. The girls, now 15 and 16, dutifully reported everything back to their mothers. None of their moms, they said in interviews, had ever had menstruation or conception explained to them.

"All the information we had before was wrong. Our parents passed it on to us. And it turns out they didn't know anything," Nora said.

The girls' curiosity veered beyond the lesson plan. By the third year of the program, they finally asked aloud the question they had been talking about among themselves. Why had they all been circumcised between age 9 and 14?

Female genital cutting remains a tradition in some rural cultures, and Egypt has a particularly persistent problem with the practice, a known health risk. Girls endure the removal of the ****oris and other genital tissue, often without anesthetic, and can suffer lifelong complications including extreme pain during intercourse, hemorrhage and urinary infections.

The girls in Daquf were unaware of the debate over circumcision. What they knew was that they had suffered an intimate wrong. Nasra had nearly bled to death after her circumcision at 12. Nora had been told that the slicing up of her labia was a celebration, a special day worth a succulent chicken and sweets. "Now I know that I was lied to," Nora said.

The girls appealed to their teachers to call parent meetings. They couldn't save themselves, but they wanted to save their sisters. They began campaigns in their own homes. The men on Ishraq's advisory board were startled by the effort. After all, they had once wondered whether these girls would ever master a declarative sentence.

Now they heard the girls lecturing their mothers and explaining what would happen to their sisters. Nasra and Um Kalthoum even began holding nighttime seminars in their neighborhoods. It wasn't the kind of talk that the imam wanted to bring up at Friday prayer but, in private conversations, he told the parents that the girls had their facts right.

The girls said they were not sure whether they convinced their parents, but they were certain, no matter what happens now, that their own daughters would not be circumcised.

Power over their lives

In the end, the successes of Ishraq might be best understood in the next generation. A little over half of the original 200 girls graduated from Ishraq. Along the way, five girls married and left the program. But dozens of girls, even among those who didn't graduate, said Ishraq helped them gain power to determine when they would marry. In many cases, they told researchers, they effectively persuaded their parents to let them wait.

Last summer, children were tested for admission to public school. Of the 50 girls who started Ishraq in Daquf, 43 took the exam. Thirty-eight passed.

One of the girls left behind was Nasra Jamal, but not because she failed the exam.

It turns out that Nasra, desperate to go to school, lied in the first hectic days of Ishraq. She told teachers that she was 14 and that a goat had eaten her birth certificate. Public school officials were skeptical. They found Nasra's birth certificate on file in the district government office and realized that she was 19 this fall. She was, they said, too old for 7th grade.

Nasra, who now works in the field and home, was heartbroken. Surprisingly, so was her mother, Nadia, who initially dismissed the idea of education for girls.

"We suffer here," said Nadia, 37, who has six children. "We do very hard work and we never had enough money . . . but, really, I wish Nasra could have stayed on there forever. She'd come home and tell us about every single day. . . . She taught us a lot.

"In my day, you were forced into marriage," she said. "When they brought in the groom, and you didn't like him, you were beaten until you accepted. That was the way it was."

Now, when Nasra gets married depends on the offers and, her mother said, even on Nasra's opinion.

Word spreads

Written scores were only one measure of the program. Word of the Ishraq girls has spread. This year the program was expanded to 300 girls. There is already a waiting list of 280. There are hopes that the program can be replicated in whole swaths of the Upper Nile to as many as 120 villages, but money is the barrier. Government funds are spare.

The British government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the non-governmental groups that funded the first round of classes are still committed. The U.S. State Department is weighing whether educating girls into womanhood translates into its vision of reform in the Middle East. Ishraq is being considered for hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a broad aid program aimed at spreading and supporting democracy.

"I'd be lying if I said we had a 100 percent success here, but you can say we laid a base," community leader Hassan said. "My motive was simple: for these girls to have a change in their lives. And it's really what happened."

Among the girls who went on to public school, few fear that they will be married before they earn a diploma for finishing 12th grade. Once the least valued of girls, they now are a little special in Daquf.

Nora Abdullah laughs out loud at how they tower over all the other 7th graders. She doesn't really care, she said. She figures that for the rest of her life, she'll always be a bit different.

"I want to get a diploma and use it. I want to be a nurse. Yes. And I will fight for that too, God willing," she said.

Um Kalthoum studies every day and, as a girl who excelled in Ishraq's cooking class, she is among the first to have a job. She bakes and sells honey cookies at a pastry shop opened by her school instructor.

The job offer sparked predictable ire from her father. Um Kalthoum relied on well-honed negotiating skills. She promised to still teach at home and even help her sister who failed the public school test. She would get her sister a job too. All the family, she promised, would benefit from an extra 80 pounds, or $13 a month.

"I think Ishraq taught us how to convince people in what we believed," Um Kalthoum said one afternoon as she cut up sweet rolls and rang up sales from a steady stream of customers. "I was afraid at the beginning. Afraid of school and afraid of this work. I didn't know if I could do any of it. ...

"But there were things in Ishraq that made us strong. And I think," she said, "we're a little stronger than most."

----------

The reporting team

Christine Spolar was the Tribune's Middle East correspondent for three years, covering the Palestinian intifada and the war in Iraq. Her work has won an Investigative Reporters and Editors national reporting award and two Emmys.

Photographer Heather Stone has traveled throughout the U.S. and abroad for a variety of assignments, including the Olympics and Yasser Arafat's funeral. She has won many national photo awards.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0412130239dec13,1,2724868.story

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 12:55 PM

You must register at this site to read the articles online.

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 01:06 PM

first we have polygyny, that the kuffar attack us upon
then the 72 wives in jannah
then female circumscision, (which they ONLY refer to it as genital mutilation)
now we have to have time limits on when women should get married

why dont we just chuck out quran and sunnah, adopt the ways of the kuffar, and then just pass out condoms to our children, make abortion a FREEDOM they can choose and call it a day (in hell)

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 01:18 PM

So you didn't read the article? :confused:

then female circumscision, (which they ONLY refer to it as genital mutilation)
now we have to have time limits on when women should get married

The article clearly confirms that the girls mentioned in the article did not receive an Islamic Female Circumscision, but were mutilated.

And a clear case is made against bearing children before puberty has been completed, and the horrific medical consequences that a girl can suffer from if childbirth is realized before the pelvis has deleloped completely.

No religion was attacked.

In fact Islamic solutions were implemented in the article regarding the successful program in Egypt.

Mashallah.

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 01:25 PM

you are SO missing the point

the mere fact that britain and usa are involved is proof enough that there is more than meets the eye

every involvement of these two is an attack on islam, no matter how well it is disguised or what cloak of "help" they are offering

the article speaks of "child marriage", which is not forbidden nor spoken of in any bad light whatsoever in islam

there is a debate in islam on whether it can happen before puberty, but other than that, Allah decrees when a girl enters womanhood, NOT the uk and usa (with their filthy morals)

marjan

19-12-04, 01:26 PM

Well after you marry your daughter off at 7 please come back and tell us how it went

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 01:30 PM

if i choose to marry my daughter off at seven, there is no islamic junction against it

but if i do, i am sure you will be able to present some daleel forbidding it

i await patiently for your daleel

marjan

19-12-04, 01:37 PM

I patiently await the day you may choose to do this. No doubt the Seven year old in question will be over the age of 16 by the time this happens.

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 01:40 PM

You may marry your daughter off at any age you choose...as would I if I were blessed with daughters.

If she married I would make duas for her and you.

However, if she later develops complications from an early pregnancy (which is the leading cause of death for girls age 15 to 19 in the developing world) or endures vaginal and anal ruptures, called fistulas, that result from bearing children much too young, (untreated fistulas can be fatal, and survivors are usually left incontinent for life.) then I will also keep her and you in my duas.

May Allah (swt) protect all children.

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 01:40 PM

i was clicking the link, hoping to see an ayat, hadith, or fatwa

marjan

19-12-04, 01:44 PM

Someone find one on health. I'm sure one exists where physical, mental and emotional health is considered important.

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 01:47 PM

so according to the two of you, the prophet put aisha's health in danger?

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 01:52 PM

What age did she first conceive a child?

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 01:53 PM

you need to do some basic islam 101

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 01:58 PM

If you can't answer the question, perhaps you do too Brother AbuMubarak.

marjan

19-12-04, 02:01 PM

This old chesnut. I don't know at what age Aisha was married. If she was 'young' it may have been because people died younger in those days so funnily enough they 'started' earlier.

2004:
I cannot see a child hitting puberty at 7, if he / she does then this in itself is usually a sign of health problem.

Another thing to note is physical maturity doesn't necessarily tie in with mental maturity.

So, maybe someone should test the theory. Since you're pro child marriage I suggest that perhaps you should try it.
You'd kill two birds with one stone, you could prove that polygamy works as do child marriages.

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 02:02 PM

If you can't answer the question, perhaps you do too Brother AbuMubarak.you could always ask your beloved shia brothers of what they say about aisha

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 02:09 PM

I'd have to see if any were online.

But you're here...so why don't you tell us the age she was when she first conceived?

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 02:11 PM

how sanctimonious of you to dare ask me a question!!!

did you learn such ego from a playground?

faqir

19-12-04, 02:20 PM

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 02:23 PM

Brother AbuMubarak:

Hmmmm....I don't consider one question to be interrogating...it was an assault of 10 questions to shwali as I complained about to Al-Nasser...and Al-Nasser and I have kissed and made up..so to speak.

But feel free to bombard the forum with posts that keep you from responding to topic or even to a request for information.

I've got to transfer my Qur'anic reference files from my old computer to this peachy keen one.

brb

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 02:27 PM

Asalamu alaykum,

In relation to our Mother Aisha radiyallahu anhu and her marriage to Sayiddina Muhammad salallahu alayhi wasalam please read:

http://lamppostproductions.org/articles/miscellaneous/InDefenseofMyBeloved.htm

And the case of ‘Aisha was that she was fit for this, especially since she was raised in a society where womanhood was reached at a much earlier age than it is in many societies today

Jazakallah khair faqir.

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 02:32 PM

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 02:33 PM

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 03:03 PM

And the case of ‘Aisha was that she was fit for this, especially since she was raised in a society where womanhood was reached at a much earlier age than it is in many societies today

Jazakallah khair faqir.whoa

is that sufficient daleel for you?

even faqir didnt say that, its a sidenote on some website

now is someone going to tell me that the women during the time of the prophet were genetically different than today's women?

so we are evolving, evolution is true, even the muslims believe in evolution

surfinjo

19-12-04, 03:05 PM

Setting aside the attempts at using the old 'I'm being persecuted by these nasty imperialist westerners because of my culture' ect. ect. I would like to add a point.

In the UK, any sexual contact between an adult and a child under 12 years is punishable by a maximum term of life in prison.

Such prisoners are called nonces. They are usually kept in separate areas, mostly locked in their cells, for their own protection. Never-the-less, most nonces can expect to be beaten up about once a day.

They eat what is called s**t stew because it is made of s**t donated by well meaning prisoners, mixed with gravy. If they don't eat it they starve.

Their families are usually hounded out of their homes. The police will frequently take the long route if called to their assistance.

As you can see, child molestors get off easy in the UK, but then we are kinda nice people.

There are a number of issues which Europeans will always come into conflict with some Muslims and which tarnish the reputations of the good Muslims.

Violence, lying, nepotism, refusal to integrate.

But one issue Europeans will never accept is child molesters.

If anyone thinks they can practice their disgusting, self centred and perverted practices here, then try to justify it by citing their religion, they had better think again.

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 03:07 PM

Huda

19-12-04, 03:18 PM

doesn't islam say that the girl needs to hit puberty before she can be married off? :s

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 03:34 PM

At the time of Muhammad (saw) women would have attained puberty later rather than earlier, this is because the more fat in the diet the earlier puberty starts (which explains why the average age of first menstruation has dropped by about 2 years in the last 40 or so years in the west) There are also other things which seem to be affecting human development, e.g. pollutants which mimic the action of female hormones. The age of first menstration is still getting lower....

ALL the information I have read about Muhammad (saw) and Aisha says that she married young (the age varies from 8-15 depending on which hadiths the writer is referring to) and that the marriage wasn't consommated until Aisha has attained puberty (which would be measured by first menstration). Given the later onset of first menstration in those times (unless Aisha somehow managed to eat a high fat high sugar diet back way back then) she would probably have consommated the marriage when she was 15 or 16 and had her first child at 16 or 17, which is not a problem biologically speaking, assuming she was not malnourished, and was otherwise fit and healthy.

So you are saying that we have evolved since the time of Muhammad (saw).

That may explain why the dangers of early pregnancy are prevalent in societies today, but that Aisha was able to conceive and bear children when she did.

I guess one option a parent could utilize if considering an early marriage for their daughter would be to have the girl be examined medically by a female doctor to determine if she has not only undergone the outward signs of puberty, but also developed internally to permit the least complications from childbirth.

surfinjo

19-12-04, 04:18 PM

ok, i am not going to ban you
but you should at least acknowledge that we are not talking about molesting children, we are talking about marriage
i know to some it may seem the same, but to us, its quite different
because otherwise, by extension you are accusing our example of being a child molester, and i will not stand for that

What people may have done over 1000 years ago is no excuse. We cannot judge what people did 1000 years simply because it was 1000 years ago.

I'm not making any criticism of what the prophet may have done then, though the actual facts seem to be in some dispute.

In another thread, on a similar subject, I cited the examples of child brides in Europe up until the middle ages.

But that is in the past.

I will not acknowledge that there is any difference at all. Children are too small and immature to manage the stress of an adult relationship. They lack the emotional maturity to deal with the problems which normal relationships between adults produce. Their physical development is not adequate for them to manage the physical side of these relationships.

Even wild animals don't force themselves upon their young until they are fully grown.

I am stating, categorically, that if anyone does anything like that in Europe now they will go to prison.

I am stating, that now, in the 21 century, anyone doing that deserves to go to prison.

If you wish to ban me for stating what is the accepted norm by decent civilised people all over the world then please do.

The only people who deserve worse than those who take pleasure out of harming and molesting children are those around them who do nothing.

There is no penality devised by man too severe for those who would stand by while a child suffers at the hands of a selfish evil pervert.

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 04:57 PM

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 05:06 PM

doesn't islam say that the girl needs to hit puberty before she can be married off? :sAs a non-Muslim, I believe the division line is that a female can be given into marriage upon birth if so decreed but, the husband may not have intercourse with her until she reaches puberty.
Of course, being a non-Muslim, I could be wrong. :)

faqir

19-12-04, 05:22 PM

The Mother of the Beleivers was married to the Prophet salallahu alayhi wasalam at the age of six. She moved into cohabitation with the Prophet and consummated her marriage at the age of nine [after puberty]. Most doctors would accept that it is considered normal for females to reach puberty from eight to twelve years of age. According to Islam a female post puberty is considered a woman and no longer a child. This was the case in most pre-modern societies. Lets not tear apart our deen to protect our dunya.

And Allah knows best.

Sultan

19-12-04, 05:24 PM

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 05:26 PM

So you are saying that we have evolved since the time of Muhammad (saw).

We haven't evolved. Women attain puberty earlier if they are raised on a high fat high calorie diet. Until modern times in the west, people did not have that much animal fat in the diet, did not have the excessive amounts of cakes, sweets etc that we have nowadays. Hence women were older when puberty started. You can see the same thing going on with modern women living traditional lifestyles (e.g. hunter gatherer tribes, places where people live off the land etc), that their average age of menstruation is 2-3 years older than in the west. In the last three generations, the average age of first menstruation has gone down by 2 years, as people have had more fat in their diet. If the next generation lives through hard times and doesn't get enough to eat, they won't menstruate until they are older.

On the other hand, certain types of malnutrition, e.g. lack of calcium or vitamin D can prevent women from ever being able to give birth safely, as it affects the development of the bones, including the pelvis. Societies who are subject to this kind of malnutrition have high rates of women dying in childbirth (however old they are when they have their first baby)

That may explain why the dangers of early pregnancy are prevalent in societies today, but that Aisha was able to conceive and bear children when she did.

I guess one option a parent could utilize if considering an early marriage for their daughter would be to have the girl be examined medically by a female doctor to determine if she has not only undergone the outward signs of puberty, but also developed internally to permit the least complications from childbirth.

The point is that in modern western society, marriage = sex straight away. This is not the case for all societies for all time. In many cases marriage was more about economics than sex. Muhammad (saw) married Aisha as a way of forging a link between the Muslims and Aisha's family's tribe, and Aisha also wanted to marry him very much. these kinds of marriages were the custom at the time (remember rich men had many wives before Islam limited the number to 4) and it did not necesarily follow that a young bride had to consommate the marriage until she was ready to. In Muhammad (saw)'s case if he had refused the marriage, this would have been seen as a dreadful thing to do. He already had other wives when he married Aisha, and he allowed her to be a child for as long as she wanted (see hadiths which describe Aisha as playing on swings, playing with dolls). As the society Muhammad (saw) lived in did not have a high fat high calorie diet, then Aisha would not have menstruated at as young an age as women on the modern high fat high calorie diet do.

faqir

19-12-04, 05:31 PM

AbuMubarak

19-12-04, 05:32 PM

That may explain why the dangers of early pregnancy are prevalent in societies today, but that Aisha was able to conceive and bear children when she did..she didnt
she never had children

Ebony

19-12-04, 05:34 PM

There are some women who i know reached puberty at 9..some even at 7.
so it still does happen.

Ws

faqir

19-12-04, 05:35 PM

Of course it does. Open up any medical text and you will see that this is considered normal. Women reach puberty before men.

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 05:49 PM

dhakiyya, I would be interested to see what medical evidence you have for these statements you are presenting as fact? [sorry, its just the critical of all evidence, medic in me]

There are, in fact, many narrations which seem to suggest that there are numerous examples of women reaching puberty at the age of nine and having children at nine to ten years in Makkan society at the time of the Prophet salallahu alayhi wasalam.

1. it's an average, so there will be younger people - the age of first menstruation in the west varies from 8-17 with the average being 12, with less fat in the diet the range might be 10-19 with an average of 14 (as a rough estimate) some societies have averages as high as 15

2. having children at 9 or 10 is early even by modern standards. How were they calculating the girls' age in those accounts? (it's possible but unlikely to be common)

3. It's fairly common knowledge that the average age of menstruation has gone down in the last 3 generations. The link with levels of fat comes from anthropological evidence from modern societies where they have low fat diets and have average age of menstruation at 15 as opposed to 12 (which it currently is in the west) - studies on western teenage girls who are dieting or excessively exercising are delaying menstruation - studies also show that women who are already menstruating will stop menstruating if their body fat goes below about 18% of body composition, and similar studies show that the female body must reach a certain percentage of body fat before menstruation will start. (in some cases women who were anorexic from before first menstruation and throughout their teens and early twenties never properly went through puberty and never menstruated properly)

I can't quote journal articles for you because I am no longer at uni and no longer have access to medical journals online.

Ebony

19-12-04, 05:54 PM

Of course it does. Open up any medical text and you will see that this is considered normal. Women reach puberty before men.
yes we all know women reach puberty before men.
but i think the issue here is that most ppl ASSUME girls dnt reach puberty as early as 7/9 in "this day and age"

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 05:55 PM

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 05:57 PM

yes we all know women reach puberty before men.
but i think the issue here is that most ppl ASSUME girls dnt reach puberty as early as 7/9 in "this day and age"

eight years old for first menstruation is considered normal now, but wouldn't have been in the 1940's - the average then was about 14, now the average age is 12. (hence the early developers now are developing earlier)

Ebony

19-12-04, 06:01 PM

I had always assumed 12/13 was more the norm, until i discovered othrwise.

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 06:05 PM

Folks, the entire practice of breeding females at such a young age was merely to foster more children and build up the clans population.
Heck, for the most part during the early years, (even today) a female child might be buried alive after birth so the young mother could continue attempting to give birth to a son instead.

Simply because these practices occurred in ages past, does not mean we must continue following them, as they are outdated and nullified by time and need.

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 06:06 PM

That said, the right combination of genetics and environment could have given any specific society an earlier average age of first menstruation, but if that was the case they will have had a high fat diet.

Any comment on the greater dangers of complications of younger mothers going through childbirth?

I can see that some girls start puberty at an early age, but doesn't it take several years for all the internal and external changes to be fully developed?

I know I had my first cycle at the age of 13, but physically did not "look" like a woman until my late teens.

I assume that there are many internal changes going on at this period that would enable a woman to accomodate the growth of a fetus and the physical deliverance of that child....isn't puberty a complete process, not just actualized by the starting of menses?

ZawjatuRaafi

19-12-04, 06:06 PM

What is this when Aisha beared children thing you all are speaking of???

Our beloved mother of the Believers beared no children!!!

As well she did not consummate her marriage until she was mensing, she was wedded to RasulAllah saw at an early age and she had a very mature mind al hamdulillah.

Marrying your young children off to brothers at such a young age as 7 is a bit much in my opinion. NO DAUGHTER OF MINE WILL BE MARRIED AT THIS AGE! BUT upon her true puberty stages if it is something I feel she is in need of and she is in a position to where she is interested I will not turn my head from it for fear that she would bring heself into something that is not permissable for her.

What i am reading in this article is not based on Islam it is based on tribalism and cultural ways from what i see. This is not islam being implemented in any way, and this is not what islam is about.

Yes a man in islam can marry a child who is young, but the actual consummation should be handled in the same manner as RasulAllah saw handled his, which was not until after the menstruation appeared.

ZawjatuRaafi

19-12-04, 06:09 PM

I know I had my first cycle at the age of 13, but physically did not "look" like a woman until my late teens.

I so do not believe you just said this on a public forum sis...

I know MANY teens that have had their babies while in their teens... Okay they are women now. But the risk is not as great as this article is coming off.

And another thing Marjan, because a girl gets her menses early does not mean she has a health problem. It is very common for some young girls to have this at an early age.

surfinjo

19-12-04, 06:18 PM

AbuMubarak what you call the norms of decent civilized people also includes fornication, homosexuality, alcoholism, gambling, abortion and a host of other immoral acts

All of these things happen in so called Islamic societies right now. We face up to them here and try to deal with them instead of wandering around with our noses in the air hiding social problems, pretending everything is so perfect.

if it was ok 1000 years ago, its ok today, if it was abominable 1000 years ago, its abominable today

No. We have no control over the past. Many things happened in the past because people didn't fully understand, they lacked empathy and because social attitudes were so different.

We can't change the past, we can just learn from it.

I apprerciate that you and some other Muslim men seem to think that you can indulge almost any selfish desire by citing some reference to Islamic text. It seems that the texts can be used to justify anything depending upon who is trying to do the justifying.

Would you be interested in buying a couple of African slaves and producing children with them?

But I'm telling you straight, if you or any other pervert comes to Europe and touches up any children, even your own, you will go to prison.

That is, if I don't get your first.

Sultan So how comes King Richard II didn't get punished for marrying a six-year old girl?

If you'd bothered to read the posts before trying on your rather obvious sucking up you might avoid making such a fool of yourself.

http://www.ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47296 reply 4

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 06:22 PM

Our beloved mother of the Believers beared no children!!!.

zawjaturaafi, Please forgive my ignorance but, what exactly do you mean when you state
"Our beloved mother of the Believers beared no children"

I'm kind of lost in the translation of what you are implying.
If one is a mother, would that not signify that she bore a child?

surfinjo

19-12-04, 06:24 PM

zawjaturaafi Marrying your young children off to brothers at such a young age as 7 is a bit much in my opinion. NO DAUGHTER OF MINE WILL BE MARRIED AT THIS AGE! BUT upon her true puberty stages if it is something I feel she is in need of and she is in a position to where she is interested I will not turn my head from it for fear that she would bring heself into something that is not permissable for her.

What i am reading in this article is not based on Islam it is based on tribalism and cultural ways from what i see. This is not islam being implemented in any way, and this is not what islam is about.

Yes a man in islam can marry a child who is young, but the actual consummation should be handled in the same manner as RasulAllah saw handled his, which was not until after the menstruation appeared.

I agree with this assessment 100%

It is considerably different from the notion that a child is ready to take on the responsibilities and pressures of adult relationships, not to mention the physical problems, even if she doesn't become pregnant.

surfinjo

19-12-04, 06:26 PM

Stan Please forgive my ignorance but, what exactly do you mean when you state
"Our beloved mother of the Believers beared no children"

I was thinking of suggesting that it may be similar to the Christian use of the term Father for God, or Son for Jesus.

But I won't.

Sultan

19-12-04, 06:28 PM

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 06:31 PM

Is this information below, accurate ?

Aisha

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha)

1 Early life of Aisha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Early_life_of_Aisha)

2 Aisha's marriage to Muhammad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Aisha.27s_marriage_to_Muhammad)

3 Her life after Muhammad's death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Her_life_after_Muhammad.27s_death)

4 Sunni and Shia views of Aisha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Sunni_and_Shia_views_of_Aisha)

5 How old was Aisha when she was married? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#How_old_was_Aisha_when_she_was_married.3F)

6 Evidence that Aisha was 9 when married (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Evidence_that_Aisha_was_9_when_married)

7 Evidence that Aisha was much older than 9 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Evidence_that_Aisha_was_much_older_than_9)

8 See Also (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#See_Also)

9 External Links (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#External_Links)

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 06:32 PM

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 06:34 PM

Well, I dunno about that. Plenty of very young schools girls in the UK are getting pregnant. So it still practiced.
That's a very different topic altogether !
You are speaking of promiscuity not traditions or lawful conduct under a religious edict.

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 06:36 PM

But I won't.
I was thinking it might have more to do with this:

3 Her life after Muhammad's death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Her_life_after_Muhammad.27s_death)

4 Sunni and Shia views of Aisha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha#Sunni_and_Shia_views_of_Aisha)

ZawjatuRaafi

19-12-04, 06:36 PM

Mother of the Believers means in general terms, because They are the women we take our examples as women from, the Wives of RasulAllah saw who implemented this deen better then any woman in Islam. Hope that helps to understand it in simple terms...

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 06:36 PM

I so do not believe you just said this on a public forum sis...

Why? :confused:

I know MANY teens that have had their babies while in their teens... Okay they are women now. But the risk is not as great as this article is coming off.

Other sources back up the risks:

The younger the mother, the greater the likelihood that she and her baby will experience health complications, primarily due to inadequate prenatal care, poor nutrition, and other lifestyle factors.5

Complications of adolescent pregnancy include babies with an abnormally low birth-weight, pregnancy-induced hypertension, anemia, sexually transmitted diseases and pre-term labor and delivery.6

Children born to adolescent mothers are more likely to be low birth-weight babies8, which, in turn, increases the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), vision and hearing loss, chronic respiratory problems, mental retardation, mental illness and cerebral palsy.9

Low birth-weight babies are also more likely to later be diagnosed with dyslexia or hyperactivity.10

In addition to these health and developmental disadvantages, children born to adolescent mothers are also more likely to be neglected and abused.11

In 1997, 12.1 percent of the children born to adolescent mothers in Mississippi were low birth-weight and 17.7 percent were pre-term.12

5. Guptor, Amit K., Eric R. Boston, and University Medical Center. Community Outreach Health Information System, 1998.
6. The March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation. Teenage Pregnancy: Facts You Should Know, 1994.
8. Ventura, S.J.; Curtin, S.C.; Mathews, T.J. Teenage Births in the United States: National and State Trends, 1990-96. National Vital Statistics System. Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics, 1998.
9. Maynard, Rebecca A. Kids Having Kids: A Robin Hood Foundation Special Report on the Cost of Adolescent Childbearing. The Robin Hood Foundation. New York, New York, 1996.
10. 9. Maynard, Rebecca A. Kids Having Kids: A Robin Hood Foundation Special Report on the Cost of Adolescent Childbearing. The Robin Hood Foundation. New York, New York, 1996.
11. 9. Maynard, Rebecca A. Kids Having Kids: A Robin Hood Foundation Special Report on the Cost of Adolescent Childbearing. The Robin Hood Foundation. New York, New York, 1996.

http://www.mfcf.org/specialreports.html

surfinjo

19-12-04, 06:37 PM

Sultan

Plenty of people get murdered.

Will you be using that as a justification next?

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 06:44 PM

Any comment on the greater dangers of complications of younger mothers going through childbirth?

I can see that some girls start puberty at an early age, but doesn't it take several years for all the internal and external changes to be fully developed?

I know I had my first cycle at the age of 13, but physically did not "look" like a woman until my late teens.

I assume that there are many internal changes going on at this period that would enable a woman to accomodate the growth of a fetus and the physical deliverance of that child....isn't puberty a complete process, not just actualized by the starting of menses?

In societies (e.g. !kung tribe) where girls start having sex when they feel like it and marriage is informal, they don't have babies until they are about 17, they have late first menstruation due to low fat diet. (frequently girls are having sex before first menstruation, but this is with boys their age who are not all producing sperm yet) They are pregnant shortly after first menses though, and have no specific problems that older women are not likely to have with giving birth. The earliest human societies were like this, with no concept of marriage, and if girls were having babies dangerously early, humans would have died out. It's more likely the case that women in the west today are starting having periods too early because of the high fat/high calorie diet. Hence it becomes possible for a girl to get pregnant before her body can really cope with it (theoretically speaking. It's also possible that she simply becomes capable of bearing children at a younger age)

Also, most complications that arise during childbirth are NOT the result of being too young, some are the result of malnutrition (e.g. deformed pelvis from lack of calcium/vit D)

a lot of women have "practice" periods for anything up to two years before they actually ovulate and are fertile, so not all women are able to get pregnant when they first menstruate. (this is of course not true of all women!)

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 06:48 PM

In societies (e.g. !kung tribe) ......
Are you one of those gyno-ophthalmologist ?

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 06:50 PM

Why? :confused:

Other sources back up the risks:

The younger the mother, the greater the likelihood that she and her baby will experience health complications, primarily due to inadequate prenatal care, poor nutrition, and other lifestyle factors.5

these risks therefore would not apply to a teenage mother who has adequate prenatal care and adequate nutrition. Smoking during pregnancy causes low birthweight babies, teenage mums in the west are often the ones that don't play by the rules.... drinking smoking having sex....... this is obvioulsy not always the case, but there are enough of them to skew the statistics.

Also, things like abuse and neglect of the baby, this would not be the case if the teenage mother was in a stable relationship and has support from the extended family (as is the case in the tribe I mentioned in the last post)

In other words, a lot of the complications are not due to being a teenage mum, but due to the way society treats teenage mums and the way teenagers in our society behave.

dhakiyya

19-12-04, 06:50 PM

Are you one of those gyno-ophthalmologist ?

No, I studied human sciences......... which is a little bit of everying :p plus I read a great deal whilst I was at uni.

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 07:17 PM

these risks therefore would not apply to a teenage mother who has adequate prenatal care and adequate nutrition. Smoking during pregnancy causes low birthweight babies, teenage mums in the west are often the ones that don't play by the rules.... drinking smoking having sex....... this is obvioulsy not always the case, but there are enough of them to skew the statistics.

Also, things like abuse and neglect of the baby, this would not be the case if the teenage mother was in a stable relationship and has support from the extended family (as is the case in the tribe I mentioned in the last post)

In other words, a lot of the complications are not due to being a teenage mum, but due to the way society treats teenage mums and the way teenagers in our society behave.

I'm sure each teenage mother in every "tribe" has a different level of pre-natal care, and both emotional and physical support from their families.

The "tribe" I got my statistics from is the tribe of the State of Mississippi. I purposely chose a Western tribe so that I would not be accused of bashing anyone. Hope the Mississippians forgive me.

I will look up teenage statistics in other parts of the world if you wish, but I'm pretty sure that it is not just the Western teens that have increased complications from early childbirth, nor is the ideal tribe that you mentioned indicative of a normal teenage mother's experience during pregnancy and childbirth.

I saw a WHO Report, but it was a pdf. file.

I'll get back to you with it's findings.

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 07:44 PM

I'm sure each teenage mother in every "tribe" has a different level of pre-natal care, and both emotional and physical support from their families.mariam, I believe where the separation in logic is regarding this matter is in how a young female human is viewed in any particular society.
Some are just chattle, to be bartered and traded for doweries.
The concept of each human being their own individual doesn't enter into that type of thinking.
Take a farmer way down there in Mississippi, he raises cows, chickens, some hogs, a few horses, he has a wife maybe a mistriss too.
As a man, he is able to count all that he possesses, " cows, chickens, some hogs, a few horses, he has a wife maybe a mistriss too.".

For this reason, I vote that for the next 100 years,
humankind places the burden on the women of the world to run things, totally.

RisingPhoinex

19-12-04, 08:02 PM

what you call the norms of decent civilized people also includes fornication, homosexuality, alcoholism, gambling, abortion and a host of other immoral acts

your "decent civilization" lacks the moral authority to critique anything islamic

thats my point

if it was ok 1000 years ago, its ok today, if it was abominable 1000 years ago, its abominable today

the calendar doesnt dictate morality, nor does what is "accepted by decent civilized people all over the world"
Is slavery ok today? I agee that Principles do not change due to time but Islam allows us to do things but some things it allows it does not reccomend. It allows slaves but it also provides means to emancipate slavery. Principles do not change over time but conditions do.

marjan

19-12-04, 08:04 PM

I know of no 7 year old girls who have started menstruating. I have seen a television programme on the rapid development of a child who began her menses at 6 and this was considered abnormal.

Stanley Stunodd

19-12-04, 08:08 PM

Is slavery ok today? I agee that Principles do not change due to time but Islam allows us to do things but some things it allows it does not reccomend. It allows slaves but it also provides means to emancipate slavery. Principles do not change over time but conditions do.

Ooooooooo! you're gonnu get two demerits for that statement ! :rotfl:

Your rep points are going to go black and in the negative, you keep talking like that ! :)

Mary Carol

19-12-04, 10:46 PM

I still cannot access WHO's pdf. files. Maybe someone else can?

http://www.who.int/topics/en/

But I found this article at Save The Children:

http://www.savethechildren.org/news/releases/release_sowm04_a.asp

More than 1 million infants – and an estimated 70,000 adolescent mothers – die each year in the developing world because young girls are marrying and having children before they are physically ready for parenthood, according to the report released today.

Pregnancy and Childbirth the Leading Cause of Death for Teen Girls in the Developing World

50 Countries Where Children Having Children Is Most Perilous
Cited in Save the Children’s State of the World’s Mothers Report

Sweden, Denmark and Finland Top List of Best Countries to be a Mother

Washington D.C. (May 4, 2004) - Save the Children a leading global independent humanitarian organization, is turning the world’s attention to the tragic consequences of millions of children having children in releasing its fifth annual State of the World’s Mothers report, which contains:

The first-ever Early Motherhood Risk Ranking identifying the 50 most perilous places in the world where early motherhood is most common and its impact most devastating on young mothers and their babies, and

The fifth annual Mothers’ Index ranking the well-being of mothers and children in 119 countries around the world. Sweden, Denmark and Finland top the list. The United States ranks 10th, and Niger last.

Children Having Children: Early Motherhood Risk Ranking

More than 1 million infants – and an estimated 70,000 adolescent mothers – die each year in the developing world because young girls are marrying and having children before they are physically ready for parenthood, according to the report released today.

The report’s Early Motherhood Risk Ranking identifies 50 countries where motherhood is most devastating for young girls and their babies. Nine of the ten highest-risk countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. Niger, Liberia and Mali top the list. Other countries with high-risk scores outside of Africa include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Haiti, Nepal, Nicaragua and Yemen.

In the ten highest risk countries, according to the report, more than 1 in 6 teenage girls aged 15 to 19 give birth each year and nearly 1 in 7 babies born to these teenagers die before age 1. The rankings are based on marriage and birth rates among teenage girls in each country as well as infant mortality rates for children born to teenage mothers.

Going beyond the numbers, the report also offers dramatic first-hand accounts from child mothers themselves about the trials of early motherhood. One mother recalls getting married at 7, having sex at 9 and becoming a widow at 12. Many child mothers say they never had the opportunity to be children themselves.

“Childbirth can be a dance with death for young girls and their babies,” said Charles MacCormack, president and CEO of Save the Children USA, noting that complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading killers of teenage girls in the developing world. “Girls are marrying and having children before they are emotionally and physically ready. Often they don’t have a choice. Girls must be valued. Alternatives to early marriage and motherhood must be made available if young girls are to survive and thrive.”

“Access to education is key,” MacCormack said. “Research shows that girls who receive an education are less likely to have babies at a young age. Even mothers with only a basic education have healthier pregnancies, safer deliveries and healthier babies because they are more likely to seek health care services for themselves and their children. Educated mothers also are more likely to send their children – including girls – to school, and to use contraception to space their births.”

Save the Children USA is calling on the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress to support increased funding for global basic education, child survival, maternal health and family planning programs in developing countries and to expand support for in-school and after-school literacy programs in the United States, particularly in the most underserved rural areas of America.

There are an estimated 115 million school-aged children worldwide who are not in school, and 60 percent of them are girls, MacCormack noted. Among the report’s other major findings:

Each year 1 in every 10 births worldwide is to a mother who is still a child herself.

Girls in their teens in poor countries are twice as likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth related causes compared with older women. Girls 14 and under face even greater risks.

Children born to children are more likely to be delivered prematurely and at low birth weight and are more likely to die in the first month of life.

Young mothers also face enormous health risks: Obstructed labor is common and results in newborn deaths and death or disabilities for the mother. Research shows that young mothers and their babies also are at greater risk of contracting HIV/AIDS.

The United States is not immune to the problem. Birth rates for adolescent girls in the U.S. are higher than in any other industrialized country. In fact, in some remote rural communities, adolescent birth rates are higher than in many developing countries.

Globally, the minimum-age-for-marriage laws must be improved and enforced.

Fifth Annual Mothers’ Index

The report’s fifth annual Mothers’ Index identifies the best and worst countries to be a mother by ranking the well-being of mothers in 119 countries based on their health, education and political status. The Index also looks at five-year regional trends that have emerged since Save the Children issued its first report in 2000.

The Mothers' Index

Top Ten Countries
1. Sweden
2. Denmark, Finland
4. Austria, Netherlands
6. Norway
7. Australia, Canada
9. United Kingdom
10. United States

Bottom Ten Countries
119. Niger
118. Burkina Faso
116. Ethiopia, Mali
115. Guinea-Bissau
112. Chad, Sierra Leone, Yemen
110. Central African Republic, Mauritania

“This year’s report marks a milestone for Save the Children,” said MacCormack. “Five years ago, we issued our first State of the World’s Mothers report documenting conditions for mothers and their children in more than 100 countries. Over the past five years, our annual Mothers’ Indexes have shown consistently that in those countries where mothers are able to survive and thrive, so can their children.”

Among the major findings in the 2004 Mothers’ Index:

Compared to a mother in the top 10 countries, a mother in the bottom 10 countries is 26 times more likely to see her child die in the first year of life and 750 times more likely to die herself in pregnancy or childbirth.

In the bottom 10 countries, one out of three children is not enrolled in school, and only 1 out of 4 adult women are literate. In the top 10 countries, virtually all children go to school and all women are literate.

Trained health personnel in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Nepal attend fewer than 15 percent of births.

Fewer than 5 percent of women use modern contraception in Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger and Sierra Leone.

KEY FACTORS: The Index identifies a mother’s level of education, her access to family planning services, and the presence of a skilled attendant at birth as most strongly associated with infant survival and well-being.

Women who are educated are more likely to postpone marriage and early childbirth, seek health care for themselves and their families, and encourage all of their children, including girls, to go to school.

As contraceptive use rises, and mothers are able to space their births at healthy intervals, death among mothers and children declines. For example, in the United States, where 71 percent of women use modern birth control, 1 in 2,500 mothers dies in childbirth and 7 out of 1,000 infants do not make it to their first birthday. Compare this to Mali, where 6 percent of women use birth control, 1 in 10 mothers dies in childbirth, and 1 in 8 infants die before reaching age one.

The Index exposes an enormous gap between the highest- and lowest-scoring countries and underscores an urgent need to address this divide. For instance, in Sweden, which tops the list, more than 99 percent of women are literate. In contrast, in Niger, only 9 percent of women are literate. And a mother in Ethiopia is 38 times more likely to see her child die in the first year of life than a mother in Sweden

Five-Year Trends:

Industrialized nations, particularly Scandinavian countries, dominate the top-tier rankings.

Several Latin American countries – including Chile, Costa Rica and Cuba – are approaching rich nations in certain aspects of women and children’s well-being.

Parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic States show improvements in women and children’s health status.

Sub-Saharan African countries have consistently ranked at the bottom of the Index, partly due to ongoing or post-conflict situations in these areas.

BACKGROUND: The status of mothers was compared in 119 countries based on six indicators of women’s well-being (lifetime risk of maternal mortality, percent of women using modern contraception, percent of births attended by trained personnel, percent of pregnant women with anemia, adult female literacy rate, and participation of women in national government) and four indicators of children’s well-being (infant mortality rate, gross primary enrollment rate, percent of population with access to safe water, and percent of children under age 5 suffering from moderate or severe nutritional wasting).

Chained_Water

19-12-04, 10:51 PM

7 does sound far too young to be menstruating.. I think between 9-15 is normal.. faqir's numbers made sense.. and I think the fat intake think sounds exagerated, there must be loads of other things that contribute to it.. khair

anyways.. the marriage thing is very much dependant on society, upbringing, and the individual.. some kids depending on those factors may be ready to get married at the age they reach menstruation, and who says that HAS to involve sex ASAP..

on the other hand some kids because of the same factors (society, their upbringing, kind of environment they lived in) may be so totally NOT ready to get married.. or able to deal with anything like that..

what exactly is the point of contention here?

there is NOTHING at all wrong with marrying at a young age in principle or practice.. because maturity is not restricted to a certain age, but varies person to person, so why should there restrictions on age.. if restrictions, they should be on maturity

it shouldn't be about how old..
the questions should be.. does this person know what marriage is?
do they know what marriage involves, entails?
do they know their responsibilitites as a spouse?
do they know about their rights as a spouse?
do they want to get married?
do they have any objection to getting married?
do they know about their body and how it works and about sex and having children?
do they know about commitment and being faithful?

that kind of stuff is what is important, not a number..

but the only thing is in practice.. it is VERY dependant on the individual concerned.. it would take a remarkable young person to go into a marriage and deal with that at a really young age and understand what is going on, their responsibilities and what marriage means and entails ..I can personally think of noone that can be classed as a child, who it would be suitable for

I don't think anyone can make any blanket statements about it.. because it depends on a LOT of things, mostly the individuals concerned. In some cases it may be all wrong and in some it will be a great thing perhaps..

and as for our Prophet(saw) and Aisha(ra).. why even bother bringing that up.. we all know that was from Allah(swt) and what an extraordinary woman Aisha(ra) was and how much love they shared in their marriage and how happy they were in it.. and their marriage was a shining example of how a husband and wife should be with one another :)

ZawjatuRaafi

19-12-04, 11:06 PM

Yes Chained from where some of us sit we can completely understand and agree with what you are saying. Unfortunately not everyone agrees which leaves the reason apparantly for discussion. Again with regards to the articles that were placed, in my opinion this 7 year old girl was not ready and did not want to get married. This then falls into cultural stuff, not Islam and not the thinking of most throughout the world. It falls under what their tribe does with their children.

Bringing Aisha RA into this was actually a good thing because it is the example that was put there for us to learn by. It if we study it well enough could have a much better understanding of some of what is written in this article...

I dont know some of the things i see going on and the thinking of others just seems to make me shake my head...

May Allah just continue to guide the Muslims, May he guide those who arent Muslim into Islam, may He unite our thinking and grant us peace in this life and the reward of the best of the hereafter in the Highest place in His shade AMEEN AMEEN AMEEN

Chained_Water

19-12-04, 11:20 PM

Ameen

and yep, true what you said about Aisha(ra).. I just get annoyed that so often when this particular topic is discussed people try to bring it in and start insinuating things, that now whenever the marriage is mentioned, I expect the worst remarks to be made.

marjan

19-12-04, 11:21 PM

who first mentioned Aisha in this thread?

Chained_Water

19-12-04, 11:25 PM

dunno.. I can't remember.. do you want me to actually check? 'Cuz I am so not doing that.. :p

marjan

19-12-04, 11:26 PM

Ahh you should check.

Reema

19-12-04, 11:27 PM

getting married at such a young age in my country today is political and cultural suicide-the boy and his family will be named and shamed very very VERY badly(will become the new generation of outcasts in society)-marriage under 16 is no longer deemed acceptable for most people including myself..:)

I want to ask you if a girl gets her period at age 6, is that all of a sudden a good reason to ship her of and get married? I mean forgods sake, i got mines first time at 10 and didnt tell my mother for four years:) looking back today-im glad i didnt but dont ask why because not even i know today why i didnt tell her loool:) (sorry for the graphicness-just shedding some light and sis mariam-i see no shame in admitting your details:p)

I, me would slaughter any of my young female cousins (since im the oldest and have no sisters) if anything like this ever happened-its inhumane and disagree all you want on this one but it is haram for a girl to get married if she hasnt started her menstrual cycle..

This article seriously gave me a headache-the details are even sickenng to me, a person who can handle usually anything-but this goes way beyond me-when i was seven my mother was wondering which school to put me in and what barbie to get me on my next bday:D (!)

absolute sickness, may these kind of people suffer in this life or the next:)

at this rate i wont marry till i'm 35:D

Allah Kbeer:)

Chained_Water

19-12-04, 11:34 PM

sis marjan.. I'm talking about general attitudes and kaafir insinuations often seen in this kind of thread in regards to Aisha(ra)

and I really dont wanna reread to follow the whole line of conversation about it.. but hopefully you get what I mean form the above posts and I agree with sis zawjaturaafi too like I said.. depends how you look at it.. if people take the good from it, then thats good.. but if people just use it as a sly way to make comments about our Prophet(saw) then that riles me big time.

and Reema.. so if a 15 yr old and her parents want her to get married.. you object?
who are you to declare what is and isn't acceptable.. if Allah(swt) has deemed it acceptable and the person in question has agreed to the marriage and so have the parents, who is anyone else to decide whether its OK or not?

Reema

19-12-04, 11:35 PM

there is NOTHING at all wrong with marrying at a young age in principle or practice.. because maturity is not restricted to a certain age, but varies person to person, so why should there restrictions on age.. if restrictions, they should be on maturity

it shouldn't be about how old..
the questions should be.. does this person know what marriage is?
do they know what marriage involves, entails?
do they know their responsibilitites as a spouse?
do they know about their rights as a spouse?
do they want to get married?
do they have any objection to getting married?
do they know about their body and how it works and about sex and having children?
do they know about commitment and being faithful?

that kind of stuff is what is important, not a number..

right so its okay for a 7 year old to get married at this age by her justification of understanding the above questions? it should be how old, it has to be-for gods sake-i would never put my seven or 10 or 11 or even 21 year old daughter in the hands of a future spouse no matter who he is, if im happy and content with him then by all means but for you to say age doesnt matter-thats complete nonsense by far..
so its okay with you for ure future 15 year old to come and tell you shes going to get hitched right by your above post? comeone sis, worlds evolved, times changed-girls these days care little for marriage from my perspective-they want careers and this and that..

Chained_Water

19-12-04, 11:45 PM

YES.. it would be more than OK by me if my daughter at 15 said mum, I want to get married. Of course, she could just mean it in a dreamy "one day, I want this this and this" kind of way.. but if she was mature and sensible and serious about it then..

Definately! She would have my 100% support.. and I would happily get her married at that age or younger if I felt it was right for her and she felt it was too

Getting married does not mean as a mother you don't care about your daughter.. and it is so patronising to suggest that parents simply want their daughters shipped off to someone else.

I would let my kids marry at any age if I felt they were mature enough individually to deal with marriage.. and I would only agree to them marrying someone I thought was suitable for them to the best of my knowledge..

you are talking about stereotypes of what girls want.. and I quite frankly don't care for stuff like that, because it's a load of nonsense to say "girls want this".. it depends on the individual.. and from my experience all girls I know.. want love in their lives amongst all that other stuff, and they would value a loving companion in their life more than "this and that" but its equally possible that all the girls you know are different..

and thats the point people are different.. it depends on the INDIVIDUAL.. not the age

ZawjatuRaafi

19-12-04, 11:46 PM

Number one I would like to remind the sisters on this forum that this is in the open forum and to preserve your hayaa subhanaa Allah. Would we as Muslim women honestly stand in a room full of brothers and non muslim men and declare when our menses came??? This is something we really need to be careful of. The preservation of hayaa is so very important for the Muslim women please sisters observe this as this is all a part of your covering...

As for Aiesha being mentioned why exactly Marjan does it matter who mentioned it. A muslim mentioned it because to many of us muslims to deny something that was a right and one of the most important Marriages of the time of Islam up until now, to deny that is an insult, and when you begin throwing around that what was done by Abu Bakr regarding his daughter is something that is not for this time I guess MANY muslims will disagree. If for whatever reason it is decided to be done by any Muslim of any young daughter that is for them to deal with their Lord on it.

Anyhow. It is sad that this little girl is being placed into something she does not sound or feel ready to be in. May allah guide her and bless her with better Ameen.

Reema

19-12-04, 11:49 PM

sis marjan.. I'm talking about general attitudes and kaafir insinuations often seen in this kind of thread in regards to Aisha(ra)

and Reema.. so if a 15 yr old and her parents want her to get married.. you object?
who are you to declare what is and isn't acceptable.. if Allah(swt) has deemed it acceptable and the pe