Yemen child bride Nujood Ali gets divorce
The little girl was waist-high, so small that the lawyers, clerks and judges hurrying through the courthouse almost missed her.
As lunchtime arrived and the crowds of noisy men and women cleared away, a curious judge asked her what she was doing sitting alone on a bench.
"I came to get a divorce," 10-year-old Nujood Ali told the jurist.
Her impoverished parents had married her off to a man more than three times her age, who beat her and forced her to have sex, she explained. When she told her father and mother that she wanted out of the marriage, they refused to help. So an aunt provided her with bus money to travel to court and seek a divorce.
Within days of that April 2 encounter, Nujood's tale and the plight of child brides in Yemen made international headlines. And thanks to the efforts of human rights lawyer Shada Nasser, who took up her cause, the girl at the center of the story has begun to overcome her trauma and dream of a better life.
Yemeni law sets the age of consent at 15. But tribal customs and interpretations of Islam often trump the law in this country of 23 million. A 2006 study conducted by Sana University reported that 52% of girls were married by 18.
Publicity surrounding Nujood's case prompted calls to raise the legal age for marriage to 18 for both men and women. Yemen's conservative lawmakers refused to take up the issue. But the case sparked public discussion and newspaper headlines. Several more child brides came forward, including a girl who sought a divorce in the southern Yemeni city of Ibb last week.
"This case opened the door," said Nasser.
Nujood said that at first, she felt ashamed about what had happened to her. "But I passed through that," she said, eyes narrowing beneath her black head scarf.
"All I want now is to finish my education," she added, her mouth curling into a smile. "I want to be a lawyer."
The girl is being identified in this story because her name already has been widely publicized in Yemen, and neither her parents nor her lawyer objected.
Nujood's unemployed father, Ali Mohammed Ahdal, has two wives and 16 children. He is among the many tribal Yemenis who migrated to the capital over the last decades looking for work. Instead, he found misery.
He arranged to have Nujood married in February to Faez Ali Thamer, a 30-something motorcycle deliveryman from his native province, Hajja.
