Urgent Evoke

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Browsing the WomenWatch feed, I came across an article on the ongoing battle over child marriage in Yemen, and remembered that I'd seen some excellent commentary on that story recently. The post notes that child marriage is as much motivated by economic factors as cultural ones. Most parents are not marrying off daughters at an early age purely to benefit themselves, but because they believe that doing so will lead to the daughters having a better future. Thus, if you want to fight the practice of child marriage, you'll get some mileage out of moving the focus to health issues (the risks of early pregnancy), and a lot more mileage out of creating alternate opportunities and limiting the factors that destroy those opportunities (armed conflict, etc.).

The prospect of fighting cultural or religious norms in pursuit of human rights makes some activists nervous, but such resistance is never as strong as it looks. As long as economic incentives more-or-less line up with tradition, people will express their resistance to change in cultural or religious terms. But that doesn't mean that most of those people are actually ideologues about the issue in question. You'll often find as many people fighting culture from within as true traditionalists.

This story got some significant attention in the global media in 2008 and 2009 (see NYT article, video), but the legal fight in Yemen is still ongoing. And while the focus is on Yemen, due to the legislation in progress, child marriage is an issue worldwide.

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