Girl drank bleach to avoid marriage to man, 75

WEDDING WORRIES: Human rights organisations are increasingly concerned about the number of child brides in Saudi Arabia.

A teenage girl who tried to commit suicide after being told by her father she would have to marry a 75-year-old man has appealed to a human rights organisation in a bid to stop the marrage.

The forced marriage drove the 16-year-old Saudi girl to drink bleach rather than marry the man, it has been reported.
 
Her own father was "swapping" her for the 13-year-old daughter of the other man and the girl saw suicide as her only way out of an unwanted marriage, Dubai's Online news service Al-Arabiya reported.
 
The girl described being taken to meet the old man and the 13-year-old in a marriage office where all had premarital tests done.

The 16-year-old has since appealed to the National Society of Human Rights to stop the marriage, asking to go live with her mother, who is separated from her father.

"Judges can punish men who force their daughters to marry like this," Sheikh Abdul Mohsin al-Obeikan, Shura Council member told Al-Arabiya, adding that the marriage contract was necessarily void because it violated Shariah law.

Earlier this month, human rights campaigners stepped up their fight to stop child marriages in Saudi Arabia.

Their call comes after the proposed marriage of an 11-year-old Riyadh boy to his 10-year-old cousin was halted after the local governor considered him too young to marry.

The case is among a recent spate of marriages involving the very young reported in the media and by human rights groups in the kingdom.

They have been widely denounced by activists, Islamic scholars and others who say such unions are harmful to the children and trivialize the institution of marriage.

The kingdom is already rocked by a high divorce rate that has jumped from 25 percent to 60 percent over the past 20 years, according to Noura Al-Shamlan, head of the research department at the Center of University Studies for Girls.

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