Al-Watan newspaper carried a report that is alarming in its nature and points out a process of abuse toward young girls in some parts of the Kingdom. The report quoted Dr. Sanaa Harasani, the supervisor at the center for premarital tests in a Jeddah hospital, as saying that the center has aborted several marriage procedures of girls who are under the age of consent, among them two sisters, one 11 years old and the other five years old.
Harasani said that the center received the two sisters accompanied by their mother who wanted to run premarital tests on her daughters as she was planning to marry them off. The mother was referred to the social worker at the hospital.
That report shows that some people are eager to get rid of their daughters, maybe as soon as they are born. To think that a five-year-old girl was about to be married off is just beyond one's wildest thoughts.
These are children, what do people think?
But to move to a less emotional note, we have to look around us and find out the reasons why these incidents take place.
No matter how we get ourselves worked up on such cases, reality has ways of hitting us in the face. Just last week a court in Onaizah rejected a divorce petition filed by the mother of an eight-year-old girl whose father married her to a 58-year-old man. As Arab News reported, the judge said that the mother does not have the right to ask for the divorce and that the petition should be filed by the girl once she reached puberty.
It turns out the father was facing some sort of a financial crisis and decided to use his daughter as a means of getting money. He married her off and took a SR30, 000 dowry.
Now we need to dissect this bitter load of news. The father obviously was not even reprimanded by the judge for what amounts to selling his own child. He did not tell him that he should protect his child instead of throwing her into a marriage with an old man. The judge did not tell the father that dowries are usually for the brides, not their fathers and therefore he has no right to keep it. The judge did not say many things he should have said.
What the judge did though is refuse the mother's plea to annul that marriage. He obviously recognized the marriage, and ordered it to pass although he asked the groom not to consummate it until the girl reaches puberty.
What sort of logic is that and how can anyone accept this?
Actually it gets worse. The mother's lawyer said, "we requested the elderly man to divorce the girl and offered to return the dowry, but the man refused." The groom or let's say (the buyer) refused to give up his purchase and judge said nothing about that. The judge should have punished the father and the would-be groom for actually participating in this crime, not refusing the mother's plea.
The accomplices in the crime include the officials who conducted a premarital test on an 8-year-old girl. As it stands, the case needs to be opened again, and the girl freed from that slavery, as no matter what the judge says that is not a marriage bond, it was slavery and the father is enjoying the money he got selling his daughter.
We hope that the human rights bodies in the Kingdom takes up this case and others like it. Zuhair Al-Harithy, spokesperson for the Human Rights Commission (HRC), said that although the commission did not know about this specific case, they are fighting this sort of marriages.
That incident was reported all over the world and got translated into different languages. Is that how we want the world to see us? I doubt it.
