A 70-year-old man has married a 15-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia, or at least he thought he did. The man claims the young girl that he paid for is older than he was told. Human right activists are outraged that there are no minimum age marriage laws set in place.
The 70-year-old man paid $20,000 as a dowry to marry the young girl, but he says her family ripped him off. CNN interviewed the man who said that his new life has already left him and that she is older than he was told.
"She is not 15 as everybody claims," the man told CNN. "She's 25 years old and she's mature enough to make her own decisions... I was fooled by the girl's family."
The girl is from the from Al-Hurath village in Jizan province which borders Yemen. It is believed that her father is Yemeni and her mother is Saudi.
There is no law about a minimum age requirement for marriage in the country, but human rights workers are outraged due to the circumstance and age difference in the marriage. It appears that the girl was bought and did not give consent for the marriage.
Human rights workers believe the girl had a fight with the old man and she fled to go back with her family. The Human Rights commission sent a worker to the girl's house and they are willing to offer them legal help for her to fight the marriage.
"When you consider the very large difference in age, it looks more like this was not a marriage, but like the girl was sold," Dr. Suhaila Zein al-Abedin of the Saudi National Association for Human Rights told CNN. "The girl's parents need to be held responsible for this."
The HRC has a goal of creating a minimum age of marriage and they've proposed that the age should be 18. Those younger than 18 would need the consent of a court to get married but conservative religious scholars have opposed any laws that would set an age limit.
Yet there is a lot of hostile feelings towards the no age limit rule. Many women is Arab countries believe that child marriage is degrading to young females.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
