A 13-year-old Yemeni child bride[, Elham Assi,] who bled to death shortly after marriage was tied down and forced to have sex by her husband[, Abed al-Hikmi], according to interviews with the child's mother, police and medical reports.(You may remember when Yemen previously made international news for its tolerance of child rape, when a nine-year-old ran away from her husband and petitioned for a divorce. And there's more!) Because we need both sides of the story, the Western press interviewed Sheik Mohammed Hamzi, an official of the Islamist Yemeni opposition party Islaah, who's against the proposed ban on raping little girls.
“I am against the child marriage law because it restrains the freedom of others. When a certain age [for marriage] is set, it violates the rights of others. For example, imagine a young man of 13 or 14 years of age who wants to have sex. … This is a violation of his rights,” Sheik Hamzi told The Times in an interview at his Sana home last week.Imagine, a young man wants to have sex. His father buys him a child bride fair and square. Keeping him from raping her is a rights violation! Won't someone think of the (male) children? He also gets in some shots about how the only reason Western feminists care is because we are ugly and jealous that nobody would marry us. Every day I mourn that nobody sold me into sex slavery before I lost all my baby teeth.
It's sad when this:
Al-Hikmi took [Elham] to a nearby medical clinic, asking a doctor there to administer her tranquilizers so she would not resist his advances. The clinic said it refused.is the most optimistic sign in the whole piece. Of course, he ended up raping her to death anyway. (via esquiver)