Story

Married at 11

I wish you could all meet a 16-year-old whom I will call Amira. If you had spent a couple of days with her, it would not be hard for you to imagine she is your daughter, or sister. And you would be proud if she was. She is intelligent, funny, and beautiful inside and out. Amira would like to go back to Iraq where she spent the first ten years of her life – living at home, going to school, playing with friends. It wasn't perfect. Her stepfather was violent towards her and her mother. But it is in Iraq, of all places, that her memories of normality are located.

In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, her Iraqi mother and Sudanese stepfather decided it would be safer to move to Sudan. And it was after their arrival in Sudan that Amira met her biological father, also Sudanese, for the first time. The second interaction of any kind that she had with her father was when she found out he had married her off to a 35-year old man who had given him money for a business venture. She was 11 years old.

I have spent the past five hours typing up the notes I took today of what Amira has been through in the past six years. I will save the details for an article I am writing on her, but in short she has not yet been able to get the divorce she so desperately wants. She has not been in school since the fifth grade but would love to go back. However there are some more fundamental issues to address before that – like finding a stable place to live (her family all pressure her to return to her husband, and say it will "cause trouble" for them if she lives with them).

I wonder, if I had been lucky enough to be her big sister, could I have protected her? Probably not. Women in her life – aunts and to an extent her mother also -- have tried to keep her safe from, at various points, her stepfather, father and now husband. But each time they too have been intimidated. And there is no system here to back them up.

At 13, Amira's father locked her in a room with her husband to "complete" her marriage. Knowing she did not want the marriage, her husband had two friends in the room. One of them thrashed her with a whip until they were able to tie her down while her husband raped her. When the case reached the police a few days later, the police asked her father and husband to sign a piece of paper saying they wouldn't harm her, before releasing her straight back into their custody.

Today, after all that she has been through, the courts will not recognize that she has been harmed by her husband, and thus will not grant her a divorce on those grounds. She cannot get a divorce unless she pays back the money her husband gave her father – an amount he claims was 30,000 Sudanese pounds (around USD 12,500).

As I was leaving our interview today Amira said she wanted to give me her scarf, but that because she couldn't go out in public here without covering her head, she wanted to get another one, and then bring hers back for me to collect another day. 'Is this possible?', she asked. 'There is a better solution' I said, and gave her my scarf. So now she has mine and I have hers.