The controversy over two child marriages in Taif has been resolved after a court granted divorces for 11-year-old Abeer and 15-year-old Sheikha from their aged husbands. Abeer now lives with her mother after leaving the social protection house where she had been residing awaiting the court's decision on granting custody to her mother. Sheikha has also obtained a divorce but remains at the protection home until her mother is granted custody. Sheikha's plight first came to light seven months ago when she attempted to commit suicide by drinking poisonous chemicals on her wedding day, which resulted in her being hospitalized at Taif's King Faisal Hospital. Authorities were called in to investigate and the case was passed on to the courts, which granted divorces for both girls on Wednesday. The Saudi press has lately been discussing the custom of child bride marriages, especially cases of middle-aged or elderly men taking prepubescent girls for their wives. Recent press reports on child marriages have sparked a wave of criticism among columnists and social activists, who have called for abolishing the custom and for setting a minimum age for marriage in Saudi law. In response, the Shoura Council passed a resolution last November setting the legal age of majority at 18. However, the council refrained from explicitly defining this as the minimum age for marriage. At the same time, the council's resolution leaves room for hope that the law permitting child marriages may be amended. In July 2008, the Saudi daily Shams reported that residents in the city of Hail were trying to stop the marriage of a 10-year-old girl to a man of 60, on the grounds that the girl's innocence was being violated and that her father was selling her to her future husband. The Human Rights Commission urged the Hail district governor to prevent the marriage, arguing that it contravened the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Saudi Arabia is a signatory. And in the same month, a court in the ‘Uneizah district rejected a plea to annul the marriage of an eight-year-old girl whose father had married her to a man of 58. The court suggested that the husband divorce her and have the dowry which he paid returned to him, but he refused, saying that he had done nothing wrong in marrying the girl. A special report by the Health Ministry stated that child bride marriages were “one of the primary causes for the emergence of physical and psychological problems... (and for) the rising incidence of disease within the family and society, which are a burden on the health system.”
