Blog 2 - Saudi teen, 70 year old man married

In Saudi Arabia a seventy year old man went to local authorities to file for a divorce from his twenty-five year old bride. He was telling the officials that his bride’s parents made him pay 20,000 dollars in order to take their daughter as his bride. He then claimed they took their daughter back after he paid them the dowry. Officials say that they believe the man is actually eighty-six years old not seventy, and they think the girl is somewhere in her teens not twenty-five like the man said he thought she was.  The Authorities granted the divorce; however, they are thinking that the girl’s parents sold her to this man because of how large the age gap is. In Saudi Arabia there is no minimum age requirement for marriage, which human rights activists are trying to work on.

I think this is a huge human rights violation. Girls should not be allowed to get married before they are mature enough to handle all of the aspects of marriage, or before their brain is fully developed. Parents should also not be allowed to allow their young daughters to marry significantly older men. One thing that really stood out to me in this article is that the authorities think that the parents may have sold their own daughter to an eighty-six year old man. I understand that is a different culture and they have different views on certain things, but come on she is just a child and she didn’t mean as much to them as the 20,000 dollars the man paid them. A dowry is an offering from the “husband to be” to the “Bride-to-be’s “family; however, I think this amount is way too excessive unless they were being bribed to sell their daughter to him. This really goes against the rights that we as humans have, such as being able to marry who we want and not being forced into a marriage with a significantly older man. Than the acts that husbands and wives do together such as sex comes into play because a child is not ready for all of that especially if they don’t know what sex is yet. 

Fantz, A., & Jamjoom, M. (2013, January 10). Cnn. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/09/world/meast/saudi-teen-divorce/index.html?iref=allsearch

Concetta Katz

2/7/13 5:08 pm 

Human Rights