Please to be destroying the world now.

[theweaselking]

8-year-old girl petitions court for divorce.

She cited as reason that her husband beats and rapes her, and that she never wanted to marry him at all - she was beaten by her father into accepting.

"Yes I was intimate with her, but I have done nothing wrong, as she is my wife and I have the right and no one can stop me," said her husband.

Comments

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

*Looks for Big Red Do Not Push Button to push.*

[unknownpoltroon.livejournal.com]

Thought it was a lever?

[harald387.livejournal.com]

Why do we even have that lever?

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

*Points to article*

[harald387.livejournal.com]

We use the button for that.

[skola.livejournal.com]

I was so hoping that was an Onion article, or an April Fool's joke.

[caerlas.livejournal.com]

Never knew a thing about Yemen until today. Great first impression lemme tell ya! Actually, I'm impressed with this little girl being so outspoken, most would probably be completely withdrawn at that age under the circumstances.

[matgb]

Worth observing that the article by a local newspaper is basically saying "this guy is scum" and what he did was clearly illegal by his own admittal.

I know a bit about Yemen, including "recovering from difficult civil war" and "some very committed and succesful re-education programmes for former indoctrinated extremists" but it's ages that I really paid that much attention.

For a mid-east country, they're trying to sort things out, whether they're doing enough or as quickly as would be good is another issue.

But yeah, very brave kid.

It was only by a year!

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Well, their age of consent is only 9... but you have to be married.

[faolan-phe0nix.livejournal.com]

Oh my stars, sometimes I hate this world.

If this is real, that little girl is ridiculously strong. Cheers to her.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

The only thing I have to say about this, other than "EW", is that that little girl is going to grow up to be somebody. You mark my words.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Imagine where she could have ended up with that kind of backbone if she hadn't had to dig herself out of a hole at eight fucking years old.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

Dunno - I could be overestimating reality, but "that which does not kill us makes us stronger".

Not that I am IN ANY WAY condoning what happened to her as a good thing, mind. I'm just saying, if she could survive that and come out on her feet and fighting, so to speak, she could probably do just about anything she wanted. And those are the kind of people who become great.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

The people who "become great" tend to be born on third base (and then go through life thinking they hit a triple.) I mean, George Bush has made a HUGE fucking difference in the world, through no effort or merit of his own.

There's no way in hell she'll be able to do "just about anything she wanted." The whole of society is pitted against her. So much of her strength and effort will be spent just getting into the stadium (to mangle the baseball metaphor) that by the time she's up to bat, it'll already be the 8th inning.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks beg to differ with you.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

And millions of women whose names you've never heard--because no one has ever heard them--are shaking their heads.

Where would a woman with Tubman's drive and courage have ended up if she had not started a slave? Even assuming it takes pain to cultivate strength, if strength through suffering were really all it took to be great, the US would have had nothing but black female Presidents since 1920.

Besides, even going with the assumption that pain can be forged into drive and courage, who are you to wish greatness though suffering on someone? What if they would simply rather simply be happy? What if Nojoud would rather simply be an eight-year-old child with a child's concerns?

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

You're missing my point, and also putting words in my mouth.

If you're going to seriously imply that I would rather this girl had been raped and abused and then ignored by a misogynistic society, than grown up to be a happy and unimportant person, then you may, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, fuck off.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Care to counter the part about being born on third base? Which is my entire point.

(I didn't mean that as an attack on your morals, incidentally. I got carried away in the rhetorical voice, and I really did mean that as generic "you," not specific.)

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

I am certainly not denying that people who are "born on third base" do have an unfairly hefty leg up on making a difference in the world, whether for better or for worse. This is one of the many ways in which the world sucks.

I am simply also saying that while the more common response to suffering and abuse is to either drown in it, or become part of the problem, sometimes, just sometimes, the opposite happens. Harriet Tubman came from arguably even worse circumstances than this girl, and ended up nothing less than a goddamn superhero, through what force of will and courage I can't even imagine.

It's a "first response" thing. Tubman escaped slavery, and promptly turned around and started rescuing first her family, and then anyone she could. That was her instinctive reaction, where many others would have just been happy they got out alive and eager to make sure they kept it that way, and no one would even blame them for it.

I see something of that in this girl, reading between the lines. She was sold into slavery and rapine and abuse, and when she was told by her own family that they couldn't do shit for her, she, an eight-year-old girl, took matters into her own hands and went to court her damn self.

That speaks of an initiative and courage that is rare, to say the least, and my response to it was to say, someday we'll hear of this girl, because even if it's not true, it fucking well should be.

We should have never heard of Harriet Tubman, either, going by the society she lived in. And yet, we did. It doesn't always or even usually happen that someone can rise from the bottom to greatness, but it does happen. That's all I'm saying.

[autobotsrollout.livejournal.com]

You mean Rosa Parks, the NAACP functionary with decent connections who duplicated an act done by previous black women who were merely arrested and forgotten?

[gothpanda.livejournal.com]

*Barfs into a bukkit*

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

You GO, little girl! Goddamn.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

It's the ME. At least Yemen is one of the more civilized portions of it and the courts and government are siding with her.

If this had happened in, oh, KSA, (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), the courts would have done NOTHING except return her to her "husband"

I worked in Qatar for a time, and the local English-language papers had stories like this from most of the Gulf States. (Except Qatar, but I have no doubts a UAE or Baharani paper would have reported THOSE stories.)