Child bride dies giving birth

A child bride aged just 12, has died in Yemen after struggling to give birth for three days, a local human rights organisation said. Fawziya Abdullah Youssef died of bleeding on Friday while giving birth to a stillborn baby in the al-Zahra district hospital. She was only 11 when her father married her to a 24-year-old man who works as a farmer in Saudi Arabia, said Ahmed al Quraishi from the Siyaj organisation, which promotes the rights of children in Yemen. He said he came across Fawziya in the hospital in Hodeida province, 140 miles west of the capital, Sanaa, while he was investigating cases of youngsters who had fled from fighting in the north of the country. "This is one of many cases that exist in Yemen," Mr al Quraishi said.

Child marriages are common in Yemen, the Arab world's poorest country which has a population of 23million, where a large proportion of society follows tribal customs. More than a quarter of Yemen’s girls marry before they reach the age of 15, according to a recent report by the Social Affairs Ministry. "The reason behind it is the lack of education and awareness, forcing many girls into marriage in this very early age," Mr al Quraishi said.

Poor parents in Yemen sometimes exchange their young daughters in return for hefty dowry payments. There is also a long-standing tribal custom in which infant daughters and sons are promised to cousins in the hope that it will protect them from illicit relationships. Al-Quraishi said there are no statistics to show how many marriages involving children are performed every year. The child bride issue hit the headlines in the UK two years ago when Nujood Ali, aged 10, went by herself to a courtroom and demanded a judge dissolve her marriage to a man in his 30s. She eventually won a divorce, Associated Press news service reported and legislators began looking at ways to curb the practice. Marrying young girls is also common in Afghanistan and in neighbouring oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where several cases of child brides have been reported in the past year, though the phenomenon is not believed to be nearly as widespread as in Yemen.