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The Arab Weekly - http://www.thearabweekly.com/?id=1763
Egypt - Girl Victims of Forced Marriages
Every year, thousands of underage Egyptian
girls are sold into marriage to wealthy men.
Deserving better. An Egyptian girl writing
on the blackboard at a public school in Giza.
By Hassan Abdel Zaher – August 28, 2015
Al-Suf, Egypt - A year ago, Ahlam underwent an experience that
shattered her life as a teenager. The 15-year-old girl was pressured by her
father to marry a Lebanese man, 25 years her senior, who — she was told — would
buy her many gifts.
Not knowing what marriage meant, Ahlam, from a village in al- Suf,
a rural area in southern Giza province, obeyed her father.
“I suffered a lot because of this marriage,” she said. “This man
treated me as a commodity, not as a human being.”
Her father gave her away to this Lebanese man in return for about
roughly $9,000. Ahlam ended with nothing but a damaged life.
Ahlam recalled how she woke up ten days after the wedding to
discover that her husband had disappeared. He had taken all the presents he
had bought for her. She didn’t hear anything about him for months but recently
learned that he was living in Germany.
Every year, thousands of underage Egyptian girls are sold into
marriage to wealthy men. Poverty is the main reason for the practice, which is
common in rural areas on the outskirts of Cairo and in the Nile Delta.
“I cannot call this a marriage but rather a kind of legalised
prostitution,” Mervat Abou Ouf, of the state-run National Council for Women,
said. “It is widespread in some villages because of rampant poverty and
ignorance.”
There are no credible figures about the number of child brides in
Egypt because most of the marriages occur outside legal frameworks. However,
Girls Not Brides, a global partnership of more than 500 civil society organisations
committed to ending child marriage, says about 17% of Egyptian girls are forced
into such marriages.
A 2008 Egyptian law prohibits the marriage of girls before the age
of 18. Child marriages thrive in the summer when wealthy Arabs visit Egypt.
In addition to the enjoying times they spend at nightclubs in
Cairo and Giza, some seek cheap and legal sex, which they find in rural areas
where families don’t have money to buy food.
Brokers — some of them lawyers and marriage registration officials
— help finalise the deal between fathers and the moneyed would-be husbands.
Some marriages are concluded through non-binding contracts that expire when
the husband returns to his home country. Other contracts falsify the bride’s
age.
A new law gives Egyptian brides the right to register children
from such marriages in their name, according to legal expert Fatma Ghoneim.
She said the wife can file a request for divorce after the husband disappears,
depending on the marriage contract and the accounts of witnesses.
“The court rules for her within months,” she added. Women’s rights
advocate Nehad Aboul Komsan said underage girls have turned some Egyptian
villages into an investment project. “This is a form of human trafficking,” she
said. “The state has to protect these girls against such kind of prostitution
and early marriage in general.”
Maamoun Gabr, a jurisprudence professor from al-Azhar University,
said the marriage of underage girls to men decades their senior for money is
against the teachings of Islam. Egypt, according to Human Rights Watch, took
steps in recent months to promote the rights of children.
In February, the government withdrew its reservation to an article
in the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child that sets the
minimum legal age for marriage at 18, the organisation said.
When Egypt made the reservation in 1999, its law set the minimum
marriage age for boys at 18 and for girls at 16.
Authorities have also started to take serious steps to curb
underage marriages. In July, police stopped 12 attempts to marry young girls to
older men. Egypt needs also to act strongly against another practice, the
marriage of girls to rapists, activists say. The rapist easily evades
imprisonment by proposing to marry his victim.
Gabr explained that Islam does not ban such a marriage because it
can prevent a bigger problem. However, Aboul Komsan and other women’s rights
activists maintain that that kind of marriage is another violation of women’s
rights as the raped woman is forced to live with the man who attacked her.
Abou Ouf called for toughening of punishments over child and
rape-related marriages. “The authorities must act strongly against these
marriages because they destroy the lives of the girls concerned,” she said.
Ahlam, the girl forced into marrying the Lebanese man, would
agree. She said she was helpless for months after her husband left. Only
recently, did a court give her the right to divorce.
She lives with bitter memories of such an early and forced
marriage.
“This is an experience that really ended my childhood very early,” she said.