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Markets in everything
A 16-year-old Saudi girl drank a bottle of bleach in an attempt to commit suicide to escape a forced marriage to a 75-year-old man, press reports revealed Sunday.
The girl identified only as, Shaikha, said her father was forcing her to marry the old man so that he could marry his 13-year-old daughter in an exchange deal, Bahrain's Tribune reported.
Here is the full story.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 20, 2008 at 01:06 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
Anyone who would do that to their daughter is sick. In any "normal" country both of those males would be prosecuted for rape and or sexual abuse of a child. 13?!
I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit.
Posted by: Jon at Aug 20, 2008 1:17:13 PM
Drinking bleach is a hardcore way to kill yourself. That stuff tastes nasty.
Posted by: Gross at Aug 20, 2008 1:23:20 PM
Sadly, I'm not sure this merits the "Markets in everything" tag, since slavery is one of the oldest markets known to exist, and isn't nearly as surprising as other entries in the series.
It is, however, appalling on pretty much every possible level. I suppose the fact that this is making news might be a small sign of improvement, but I wouldn't know.
Posted by: d.cous. at Aug 20, 2008 1:29:38 PM
So this is offered as evidence of a different value structure for kids. When 100 years ago children were required by their family to work, sometimes sober, at a factory with very dangerous equipment there was no more advanced nation to condescend. I wonder at what level indulging in the luxury of human rights can be endogenous. Does it follow that we as exogenous (or endogenous in some cosmopolitan sense) have the responsibility to eliminate this repugnant behavior. Is the price of enlightenment the necessity to intervene in a coercive manner? Perhaps the best non-coercive result is to investigate the most superior wealth generating proposal and introduce it as quickly as possible to all corners of the world. My favorite hypothesis is free trade. That way some truly endogenous process would allow for the locally induced repugnance for this behavior.
Posted by: mthomas at Aug 20, 2008 1:31:36 PM
I'm bet this transaction was going to be celebrated with a toast of oil-filled champagne glasses, followed by a soak in a jacuzzi filled with oil.
jon- i'm with you on the bad taste that came up the back of my throat.
Posted by: dr3w at Aug 20, 2008 1:31:51 PM
L'adulte est dit pervers s'il impose au dépend de l'autre une situation qui le satisfait lui. Les traits caractéristiques de ce mécanisme de défense sont donc la manipulation et le refus des envies et besoins de l'autre au profit des siens. La perversion sexuelle n'en est qu'une expression, alors pour éviter l'amalgame induit par le sens courant, on parle aussi de perversion morale.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perversion
Elle ne vise aucune cible, qu'il disait.
Si, le " paradis ". Uniquement ;D
CHOZ | 08.20.08 - 7:54 pm | #
Posted by: choz at Aug 20, 2008 1:52:20 PM
Can anyone recommend me some pop economics books besides Freakonomics?
Posted by: jack at Aug 20, 2008 2:08:06 PM
mthomas, Saudis are not permitting this because they don't have enough money.
-dk
Posted by: Dick King at Aug 20, 2008 2:13:27 PM
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that most muslims feel that forcing a daughter to marry is haraam (forbidden by God). In addition, while child marriages are fairly common (from an American's standpoint) in the middle east, it is understood that the marriage would not be consummated until the girl achieves sexual maturity. Apparently, the prophet Mohammed did this, and that's the excuse for continuing the practice today. Never mind that things have changed a bit since his time... So forcing a girl to marry and having sex with children is considered haraam by many people, but tribal norms often times trump religion, and of course there's always the possibility of sickos taking advantage of those norms... A sad story any way you look at it.
Isaac Crawford
Blogging in Yemen
www.isaharr.com
Posted by: Isaac Crawford at Aug 20, 2008 2:33:23 PM
Actually Isaac, Mohammed married a 9 year old ... he however restrained himself from consummating said union until she was ... wait for it ... 12.
This is slavery, plain and simple.
Posted by: Jon at Aug 20, 2008 2:46:28 PM
dk,
evidence, argument, assertion - I would make distinctions between these three words.
A possible first approximation to refute your assertion: People behave rationally, even people who you do not like. My french is not so good, but the earlier commenter seems to be directing us to a cite on perversion, to the extent that this case is an example of irrational behavior, we cannot really say much about this case other than it is unfortunate that mental disease exists.
If we were willing to view this "father" (a term which I wouldn't really apply to this case since it does not fit our common use of the word) as a rational actor however, we have to have some explanation of his behavior. The child is an asset to him in a world where property rights of male haploid cell donor is given full rights to his children. I think that we can safely classify this particular property rights situation as slavery. We know from careful analysis of slavery in other contexts (RW Fogel, JR Hummel) that its usefulness is dictated by opportunity costs of the asset. While I agree that the systematic disenfranchisement of women is a problem for the analysis (the article talks about the de jure necessity of consent of both parties, but I will grant you that de facto this is absurd), I believe that even this would break down endogenously as wealth increases.
Additional comments:
What I remain ignorant of is the wealth of the family in question. Surely poverty exists in Saudi Arabia even if the top families are among the wealthiest in the world. My quick web search did not produce a Gini coefficient or statistics on poverty for the country, so as of now I have not eliminated my ignorance.
What I do object to, as evidenced above, is analysis based on repugnance and misplaced cosmopolitan justification for intervention. Granted, this is my own horn to toot and does nothing to help the poor individual in question, but I would like to advocate for more dispassionate analysis potentially applicable in a broader context.
Posted by: mthomas at Aug 20, 2008 2:46:40 PM
"In addition, while child marriages are fairly common (from an American's standpoint) in the middle east, it is understood that the marriage would not be consummated until the girl achieves sexual maturity. Apparently, the prophet Mohammed did this, and that's the excuse for continuing the practice today."
What "sexual maturity" constitutes is a very arbitrary matter, so in general the age of nine is the standard as you note. Mohammed married Aisha when she was six and consummated it when she was a mere nine years old. Thus Iran's legal age of marriage is nine for girls, for example. In Saudi Arabia there is no law to set a minimum age for marriage. Here a Saudi marriage cleric discusses why it's legal to marry a 1 year old girl:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CqhKar5vJA
He explains that sex must wait until she is nine years old.
Posted by: Yaku at Aug 20, 2008 2:55:54 PM
It sounds a lot like what those Mormon fundamentalists were doing in Texas.
Posted by: KingM at Aug 20, 2008 3:03:49 PM
Actually Isaac, Mohammed married a 9 year old ... he however restrained himself from consummating said union until she was ... wait for it ... 12.
This is slavery, plain and simple.
Well, I'm not sure how different things were with Mohammed and his culture and the rest of the world at that time when it came to sexual relations with 12 year olds. My gut feeling is that happened pretty often and wasn't overly unusual back then. Not that that excuses doing that in today's world mind you.... So while I accept the term of slavery being used for the present circumstance, I think it's a little trickier to try to do that for things around 500AD.
Isaac Crawford
Posted by: Isaac Crawford at Aug 20, 2008 5:28:54 PM
The last paragraph of the story says
"Islamic law states that for a marriage to be legal both parties must consent."
Yet most people here assumed that this is a product of their religion and not the screwed up society that exists in Saudi Arabia. There was a time that such things happened in Christian countries, and is the result of denying rights to women and which still echoes in the way western society treats women.
Posted by: joan at Aug 20, 2008 6:40:35 PM
If it matters, Aisha was SIX years old when they married and NINE when they consummated the marriage. They did marry younger back then but that was still considered somewhat young. Either way, whether it was of the times or not, it is certainly not of this time and only underscores how dated the legal systems of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other societies, are that regard this as a model to follow.
Regarding slavery, his 11th wife Safiyya bint Huyayy was captured (from the Jewish Banu Nadir tribe) as a slave and after overseeing the murder of her husband and father, Mohammed married her. Not such a great model either.
Pardon the caps, it seems you can't italicize on this blog.
Posted by: Yaku at Aug 20, 2008 6:47:20 PM
Maybe the idea of having a 13-year old step mum freaked her out. After-all, she was 16. At least there was no Craigslist angle to this. That would have been weird.
Posted by: BoscoH at Aug 20, 2008 8:41:28 PM
There are plenty of markets in young girls. The Cambodian market shows more liquidity, if the newswires are to be believed.
Posted by: Omri at Aug 20, 2008 9:23:37 PM
Assuming the story is true, this is awful. But her fate is no worse than those of American men who get bulldozed by politically-driven prosecutions of rapes that never occurred. Does the Saudi system result in more injustice than the man-hating paranoia we have in the United States? I have no idea.
Posted by: Jeff Goldman at Aug 21, 2008 11:08:56 AM
Who cares about the age? It's the FORCING that's bad.
Posted by: at Aug 21, 2008 11:42:41 AM
"Who cares about the age? It's the FORCING that's bad."
In this case, I'd actually say it's both. According to the story it's the 16-year-old who objected and was being forced, and that's terrible. It doesn't really mention what the 13-year-old thought of the arrangement, but I assert that even if she's alright with it, it's still awful. I admit that where the line is drawn is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, but I think that the idea of an age of consent is a very good one. A 13-year-old girl may very well be willing, particularly given a messed-up upbringing, to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather, but I seriously question how informed a decision she is equipped to make at that point.
Also, aren't there serious physical and psychological health concerns here? I'm not a doctor, but it seems like if the girl is BARELY adolescent, there's a lot that could go wrong. I could be wrong.
I would tend to apply this more to Saudi or even more local culture than to Islam as a whole, notwithstanding the whole Mohammmed/Aisha thing. Yes, I'm pretty sure that Christians/Europeans used to have somewhat common forced and underage marriages, too. There are a lot of things our society has done wrong, but I don't think abolishing that sort of thing is one of them.
Whine about Income disparity in the West if you wish, but it's stunning to me that Saudi Arabia has some of the wealthiest people in the world, and also (apparently) people still essentially in the dark ages.
Posted by: d.cous. at Aug 21, 2008 12:50:52 PM
"[H]er fate is no worse than those of American men who get bulldozed by politically-driven prosecutions of rapes that never occurred."
Is that problem epidemic? I'm sure it does happen, but isn't this sort of a random place to bring it up? Honestly?
Posted by: d.cous. at Aug 21, 2008 12:54:30 PM
D.Cous, I don't think this is a random place to bring up the failings of our own system because people always tend to notice the moral problems in others' systems but not in their own. So Westerners read about a story like this and think to themselves, how can those Saudis be such obtuse barbarians? And I would argue that our system is not necessarily better from a moral standpoint. Just a few moral failings we have that we don't talk about:
1. The labeling of men as sex offenders for petty offenses. This is made possible by the climate of man-hating that pervades our major media outlets.
2. The labeling of young boys as sex offenders.
3. Prosecuting innocent men on trumped up charges of rape.
Posted by: Jeff Goldman at Aug 21, 2008 2:57:48 PM
"Regarding slavery, his 11th wife Safiyya bint Huyayy was captured (from the Jewish Banu Nadir tribe) as a slave and after overseeing the murder of her husband and father, Mohammed married her. Not such a great model either."
I agree with Yak. The behavior of semetic people in the Quran and the Bible toward women is awful. The israelites unleashed pogroms, killed women and children and took the surviving women as sex slaves that the bible kindly calls 'concubines'. King David murdered a man to steal his wife. Solomon has oodles of sex slaves...i mean...concubines. Muhammed, head of the Muslim nation, married people we could consider children.
I'm glad no one is claiming any kind of virtue monopoly here.
Posted by: Martin at Aug 22, 2008 11:27:14 AM
It sounds a lot like what those Mormon fundamentalists were doing in Texas.
I think you mean Mormon Fundamentalists (uppercase). Most Mormon fundamentalists (lowercase) would be appalled by this.
Posted by: Je pense, donc je suis. at Aug 22, 2008 1:50:22 PM
