CHILD MARRIAGE
Another serious issue that negatively impacts on women is child marriage, which violates a number of human rights guaranteed in international human rights instruments.[1037] The practice perpetuates gender discrimination by placing women in an inferior position, ‘disempowered to participate equally in their marriage, sexual and reproductive choices’.[1038] There is now medical evidence that early marriages could have adverse effects on a child’s mental health and physical health.[1039] This includes poor sexual and reproductive health, which often results in maternal mortality and morbidity as a result of early pregnancies.[1040]
There is no minimum age for marriage set out in the Qur’an, so jurists established the position that once a child becomes an adult, they can marry.[1041] Childhood under Islamic law is not defined by age, but instead is characterised as anyone who has not yet reached puberty.[1042] Most child marriages are forced marriages,[1043] as in most cases, there is no consent of the child.
To counteract this problem, the CEDAW Committee suggested that ‘no marriages shall be entered into before the age of 18 for both spouses’.[1044] Further, article 16(2) of CEDAW holds that ‘child marriages shall have no legal effect’.[1045] However, as earlier stated, both Tunisia and Saudi Arabia imposed reservations on this article. Since Tunisia lifted all reservations, it is now obliged to comply with the article. In Saudi Arabia, however, child marriage continues.
Under Hanbali law, a father or guardian has the right to contract his previously unmarried wards into marriage without their consent.[1046] While this is generally stated as the position of the Hanbali school, another opinion states that the consent of both parties is essential for a marriage contract, and numerous hadiths say a virgin should not be given into marriage without her consent.[1047]
Two recent decisions to annul child marriages in Saudi courts have been praised as landmark judgments, as they were given around the same time a number of fatwas were issued declaring that there should be no set minimum age for marriage and it is permissible for young girls to wed.[1048]
A court in Qatif annulled the marriage of a 14-year-old girl who had been contracted into marriage to an elderly man by her father without her consent.
The court considered the girl’s best interests and found that the marriage resulted in a deterioration of her education and psychological health.[1049] This was the first known case where a Saudi judge annulled a child marriage to an elder.[1050] Similarly, in March 2009, the Court of Appeal in Riyadh reversed a judgment that had held that ‘the marriage of an 8-year-old girl to an elderly man was legal, despite the fact that she had been contracted into marriage by her father without her knowledge’.[1051]VIII.
More on the topic CHILD MARRIAGE:
- Marriage and Child-rearing
- One issue that marriage always raises centers on property: if two persons from different families form a household, what effect will that have not only on the property they each own at the time the marriage is contracted but also on what they acquire during the marriage?
- CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT (CHILD MALTREATMENT)
- The main criteria for a valid marriage in Roman law were the consent of both parties (and the paterfamilias of each) and the absence of any legal prohibitions on marriage between the two people involved [see Chapter 2, Part I.A.2]. In both the classical and late antique periods, the major prohibitions on marriage derived from kinship and status.
- UNICEF has called child sexual assault ‘a fundamental violation of children's rights',1 while the World Health Organization (WHO) has named it a ‘serious infringement on a child's right to health and protection'.[234] [235]
- The physiatric history and examination of a child require a blend of medical diagnostic skills to establish or confirm the diagnosis as well as a knowledge of child development and behavior to evaluate functional assets and difficulties for the intervention phase of rehabilitation.
- Nikah-Only Marriage Is Non-marriage
- Marriage and marriage dissolution
- In her book, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity, Kate Cooper argues that the Christian ideal of virginity was persuasively presented to Roman urban elite in terms that shifted the dependence on marriage (and the benefits that this social agreement implied) to “a model of otherworldly allegiance”[79] that dispensed with marriage.
- Marriage and marriage arrangements