Child Predation

Can there be any logic to arranging for children as young as eight to be taken in marriage? That mature, adult men seek to bind young girls to them as sexual objects should label them accurately as disgustingly disturbed child predators. But in some societies there is a custom and a culture which accepts what has become a tradition of handing over young girls, very young girls, to the predatory devices of men attracted to girls as their sexual partners.

Call it the Lolita syndrome, given a kind of psycho-social cleansing through a hugely acclaimed novel by Vladimir Nabakov. And he is not the only one, a writer of high literary acclaim, who has written about the carnal attraction of mature men for young girls. The Nobel Prize for Literature went to Gabrielle Garcia Marquez for his much-vaunted otherworld-fantasy novel, One Hundred Days of Solitude, wherein he too wrote of such a mind-numbing incident in a picaresque novel.


It is a dreadful situation that young girls face in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, India and other places in the world where religion and local culture and the heritage of a patriarchal society in which women's and girl's human rights are traditionally violated.  Child marriage is simply social acceptance of pederasty.

These 'marriages' have a devastating effect on the child. Forced sex, a degraded life devoid of human dignity, lack of education, and virtual life-time sexual enslavement.

Photography by Stephanie Sinclair

"Whenever I saw him, I hid. I hated to see him," Tahani (in pink) recalls of the early days of her marriage to Majed, when she was 6 and he was 25. The young wife posed for this portrait with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their mountain home in Hajjah

The societies that accept this tradition as normal and respected, breeds men who are brutal and misogynistic. One such man, an 84-year-old, originally from Pakistan and living in Britain enslaved, imprisoned and repeatedly raped a deaf and mute girl he trafficked into Britain. Ilyas Ashar brought the girl to Britain from Pakistan when she was ten. The child was beaten and locked in the basement of the family home near Manchester.

Tallat Ashar, the wife of Ilyas, was fully complicit with her husband in the child's treatment. "To you she was merely an object to be used, abused and cast aside", said Judge Peter Lakin committing the man and his wife to jail terms. The illiterate child was taught to write her name so her tormentors could claim child benefits in her name. Tallat Ashar was jailed for five years, her husband for 13 years.

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Canada is preparing on Thursday to introduce a stand-alone, first-ever resolution on child, early and forced marriage, at the United Nations General Assembly. It is a resolution reaffirming commitments to protect children, and calling for action in the General Assembly "to address this barbaric practise", in the words of Canada's foreign affairs minister, John Baird.

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