The secret world of the child bride: Heartbreaking pictures of the girls as young as FIVE who are married off to middle-aged men

အရြယ္မေရာက္ေသးသည္ ့မိန္းကေလးသတုိ ့သမီးမ်ား....

၀ုိင္းစက္ၿပဴးက်ယ္ေသာမ်က္လံုးမ်ားႏွင္ ့တေစၧအေၿခာက္ခံရသကဲ ့သုိ ့ေသာမ်က္ႏွာသြင္ၿပင္မ်ားေႀကာင္ ့ထုိ
မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားရဲ ့မ်က္ႏွာမ်ားက သူတုိ ့ေလးေတြရဲ ့အၿပစ္ကင္းမဲ ့မွဳမ်ား ရက္စက္ႀကမ္းႀကဳတ္စြာ လုယူ
ဖယ္ရွားခံခဲ ့ႀကရေႀကာင္းအ၇ိပ္အၿမြက္၊ သက္ေသၿပေနပါေတာ ့တယ္...
သူတုိ ့ေလးေတြအေနႏွင္ ့ေပ်ာ္ရြႊင္စြာကစားေနႀကရမည္ ့အစား၊ ပညာသင္ႀကားရမည္ ့အစား၊ ကေလးဘ၀
အပူအပင္ကင္းစြာေနထုိင္ႀကရမည္ ့အစား လက္ရွိဘ၀ကေတာ ့တစ္ၿခားစီၿဖစ္ေနႀကပါတယ္...
ထုိသုိ ့ေႀကာင္ ့ႀကမဲ ့စြာေနႀကရမည္ ့အစား မိန္းက ေလးငယ္မ်ားဟာ ဗူးသီးႏုႏုအေမႊးသတ္သလုိ အရြယ္မ
ေရာက္မွီမွာပင္ လူႀကီးဘ၀ ( အိမ္ေထာင္သည္ဘ၀ ) ေရာက္ႀကရရွာပါတယ္...
အသက္ ၅ မွ်အထိ ငယ္ရြယ္သည္ ့မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားကုိ လွ်ဴိ ့၀ွက္စီစဥ္ၿပီးလက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားေပးေလ ့ရွိ
ႀကပါတယ္...
ဖြံ ့ၿဖဳိးဆဲနုိင္ငံမ်ားမွ အရြယ္မေရာက္ေသးသည္ ့မိန္းကေလးေပါင္း ၁၀ သန္းမွ ၁၂ သန္းအထိ ႏွစ္စဥ္ အတင္း
အႀကပ္ လက္ထိပ္ထိမ္းၿမားေပးေလ ့ရွိတယ္လို ့ခန္ ့မွန္းႀကပါတယ္...

သမီးေတာ ့သူ ့ကုိၿမင္တုိင္း ေအာ ့ႏွလံုးနာတယ္...လို ့ဆုိတဲ ့
အသက္ ၆ ႏွစ္အရြယ္မွာ အသက္ ၂၅ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ မဂ်စ္ ကုိလက္ထပ္ခဲ ့ရတဲ ့တာဟနီ ( ပန္းေရာင္၀တ္
စံုႏွင္ ့မိန္းကေလး ၿဖစ္ပါတယ္...)
ပုံမွာ မိန္းကေလးဟာ သူႏွင့္ကံတူအက်ဴိးေပး၊ဘ၀တူ ေက်ာင္းေနဖက္သူငယ္ခ်င္း ဂါဒါႏွင္ ့
ဟာဂ်ာေတာင္ေၿခရွိ ၎တုိ ့ေနအိမ္ေရွ ့တြင္ ႏွစ္စံုတဲြဓါတ္ပံုအရိုက္ခံခဲ ့ပါတယ္...

'Whenever I saw him, I hid. I hated to see him': Tahani (in pink) was just six years old when she she married Majed, 25. The young wife posed for this portrait with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their mountain home in Hajjah

အိႏၵိယနုိင္ငံမွာေတာ ့မိန္းကေလးေတြကုိ သူတုိ ့ထက္ အသက္ ၄ ႏွစ္၊ ၅ ႏွစ္ ပုိႀကီးသည္ ့ေကာင္ေလးမ်ား
ႏွင္ ့လက္ထပ္ေပးႀကတာထံုးစံပါပဲ...
ယီမင္၊ အာဖဂန္နစၥတန္၊ အီသီယုိပီးယားႏွင္ ့တစ္ၿခားေသာ အရြယ္မတုိင္ခင္လက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားေပးေလ ့ရွိ
သည္ ့အၿဖစ္အပ်က္မ်ားသည္ ့တုိင္းၿပည္မ်ားတြင္ေတာ ့ခင္ပြန္းၿဖစ္သူဟာ လူငယ္လူရြယ္ၿဖစ္ခ်င္ၿဖစ္မည္ သို ့
မဟုတ္ အသက္ ငါးဆယ္ေက်ာ္ မုဆုိးဖုိေတြ၊ သုိ ့မဟုတ္ အတင္းအဓမၼမုဒိန္းက်င္ ့ၿပီးေနာက္ ထုိမိန္းကေလး
မ်ားအား ၎တုိ ့၏ဇနီးမယားမ်ားအၿဖစ္ ေၿပာဆုိသိမ္းပုိက္ႀကသူမ်ားၿဖစ္တတ္ႀကပါတယ္...
တစ္ခ်ဴိ ့လက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားၿခင္းမ်ားကေတာ ့စီးပြားေရးဆုိင္ရာ၊ ကုန္ဖလွယ္သကဲ ့သုိ ့ဒါမွမဟုတ္ မိသားစုအ
ေရးေႀကြးမီွကိစၥေၿဖရွင္းဖို ့ေႀကာင္ ့လည္းၿဖစ္ပါေသးတယ္...
အရြယ္မတုိင္မီအတင္းအႀကပ္လက္ထပ္ေပးၿခင္းမ်ားဟာ နုိင္ငံေဒသမ်ားမွာ ဥပေဒမ်ားႏွင္ ့ဆန္ ့က်င္စြာပင္
ရွိေနတတ္ပါေသးတယ္...
ထုိေဒသပါတ္၀န္းက်င္လူမွဳအသုိင္းအ၀န္းက မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားအား ထုိသုိ ့ေစာစီးစြာလက္မထပ္ေပးပါက
သင္ ့ေတာ္သူမ်ားႏွင္ ့မဟုတ္ပဲ လြန္က်ဴးမိတတ္က်၊ အပ်ဴိရည္ပ်က္တတ္ႀကတာမုိ ့ယခုကဲ ့သုိ ့စီစဥ္ေပးၿခင္း
သည္သာလွ်င္ သင္ ့ေတာ္ေလ်ာ္ကန္သည္ ့နည္းလမ္းေကာင္းတစ္ခုၿဖစ္တယ္လုိ ့ယူဆႀကပါတယ္...

ထုိသုိ ့အတင္းအႀကပ္လက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားၿခင္းအခမ္းအနားမ်ားကုိ ညသန္းေခါင္ယံအခ်ိန္မ်ားတြင္ အမ်ားအား
ၿဖင့္ၿပဳလုပ္ေလ ့ရွိႀကၿပီး အဓိကအားၿဖင္ ့ရဲမ်ားလာေရာက္မတားဆီးမေႏွာက္ယွက္နုိင္ရန္ တစ္ရြာလံုးကလွ်ဴိ ့
၀ွက္စြာစီစဥ္ႀကၿခင္းၿဖစ္ပါတယ္...
ယခုကဲ ့သို ့ထိတ္လန္ ့တုန္လွဳပ္ေၿခာက္ခ်ားဖြယ္ရာအေႀကာင္းအရာမ်ားကုိစံုစမ္းေဖာ္ထုတ္ရန္အတြက္ အမ်ဴိး
သားပထ၀ီ၀င္အသင္းႀကီးမွ ဓါတ္ပံုသတင္းေထာက္ စင္သီယာေဂၚေန ႏွင္ ့ဓါတ္ပံုဆရာမစတက္ဖနီဆင္က
လဲယား တုိ ့ဟာ ယီမင္နုိင္ငံႏွင္ ့အိႏိၵယနုိင္ငံ၊ ရာဂ်က္စသန္ ၿပည္နယ္တုိ ့ကုိသြားေရာက္ခဲ ့ႀကပါတယ္...

အိႏိၵယနုိင္ငံမွာေတာ ့မိန္းကေလးမ်ားကုိ အသက္ ၁၈ ႏွစ္မတုိင္မီ တရား၀င္လက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားေပးခြင္ ့မရွိ
ႀကေပမယ္ ့ဆယ္ေက်ာ္သက္အရြယ္မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားရဲ ့မဂၤလာပဲြမ်ားကုိေတာ ့(သက္ဆုိင္ရာတာ၀န္ရွိသူ
မ်ားက ) လစ္လ်ဴၿပဳထားခဲ ့ႀကပါတယ္...
အသက္ ၅ ႏွစ္အထိငယ္ရြယ္သည္ ့မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားကုိ မဂၤလာဖိတ္စာမ်ားတြင္ နာမည္မေဖာ္ၿပပဲ လွ်ဴိ ့
၀ွက္စြာ ေဆာင္ႏွင္းေပးႀကပါတယ္...

ဦးေလးၿဖစ္သူက အိပ္ယာကႏွဳိးၿပီး သတုိ ့သားအိမ္ကုိခ်ီသြားေနသည္ ့အသက္ ၅ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ
သတုိ ့သမီးေလး ရာဂ်နီ....

Well past bedtime: Child marriage might be illegal in India, but this doesn't stop ceremonies taking place in the small hours of the morning - it becomes a secret the whole village keeps, explained one farmer. Here, five-year-old Rajani is roused from her sleep long after midnight and carried to her wedding by her uncle

ဘာဆုိဘာမွမသိေသးတဲ ့အရြယ္...

သတုိ ့သမီး ရာဂ်နီ ႏွင့္သတုိ ့သားကေလး...

So young: Barely looking at each other, Rajani and her boy groom are married in front of the sacred fire. According to tradition, the young bride is expected to live at home until puberty, before she is transferred to her husband

 
ရာဂ်က္စသန္မွၿဖစ္ရပ္တစ္ခုတြင္ ဆယ္ေက်ာ္သက္အရြယ္ အစ္မၿဖစ္သူမ်ားလည္းလက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားခဲ ့ႀက
ၿပီးေနာက္ အသက္ ၅ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ သတုိ ့သမီးေလး ရာဂ်နီခၿမာမွာေတာ ့သူမရဲ ့မဂၤလာပဲြမစခင္အခ်ိန္ေလး
အထိ အိပ္ေပ်ာ္ေနခဲ ့ရွာပါေသးတယ္...
သူမရဲ ့ဦးေလးၿဖစ္သူတစ္ဦးက သူမကုိ ကုတင္ေပၚမွေပြ ့ခ်ီသြားၿပီး လေရာင္ေအာက္မွာပဲ ေကာင္းခ်ီးေပး၊ ႀသ
ဘာေပးမည္ ့ဟိႏၵဴဘုန္းႀကီးထံႏွင့္ သူမရဲ ့ခင္ပြန္းၿဖစ္သူ အသက္ ၁၀ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိေကာင္ေလးထံသုိ ့ေခၚသြား
ခဲ ့တာၿဖစ္ပါတယ္...
သတုိ ့သမီးကေလးငယ္မ်ားအေနႏွင္ ့အရြယ္ေရာက္သည္အထိ မိမိတုိ ့မိသားစုႏွင့္ ဆက္လက္ေနထုိင္ႀကရ
တတ္ေပမယ္ ့ အၿမဲတမ္းေတာ ့ထုိကဲ ့သုိ ့ခ်ည္းမဟုတ္ပါဘူး....
လြန္ခဲ ့သည္ ့၃ ႏွစ္က ႏူဂ်ဴဒါအလီ ေလးရဲ ့ဇတ္ေႀကာင္းကေတာ ့ကမာၻသိဟုိးေလးတေႀကာ္ၿဖစ္ခဲ ့ပါတယ္...
အသက္ ၁၀ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ ယီမင္နုိင္ငံသူေလးဟာ သူမရဲ ့ဖခင္ၿဖစ္သူက အတင္းအႀကပ္လက္ထပ္ေပးခဲ ့
သည္ ့အသက္ ၃၀ ေက်ာ္အရြယ္ရွိခင္ပြန္းၿဖစ္သူက ရုိက္ႏွက္ခဲ့လို ့တရားရံုးသုိ ့ေရာက္ေအာင္ထြက္ေၿပးလာ
ခဲ ့ၿပီး ကြာရွင္းခြင္ ့ေတာင္းခဲ ့ပါတယ္...
သူမဟာ ငယ္ငယ္ရြယ္ရြယ္ႏွင့္အသက္မၿပည့္မွီအတင္းအႀကပ္လက္ထပ္ေပးၿခင္းခံရသူ  ကမာၻတစ္၀ွမ္းမွ
မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားအတြက္ နမူနာၿဖစ္ခဲ ့ၿပီး သူမရဲ ့ဘ၀ဇတ္ေႀကာင္းၿဖစ္သည္ ့ ကြ်န္မအမည္ ႏူဂ်ဴဒ္၊ အ
သက္ ၁၀ ႏွစ္၊ တစ္ခုလပ္ ၿဖစ္ပါတယ္ စာအုပ္ကိုလည္း မႀကာေသးခင္ကမွ ပံုႏွိပ္ထုတ္ေ၀ခဲ ့ပါတယ္...
သူမဟာ ယခုအခါမွာေတာ ့မိသားစုႏွင့္အတူၿပန္လည္ေနထုိင္ၿပီး ေက်ာင္းၿပန္တက္လွ်က္ရွိပါတယ္...

( သူမကဲ ့သို ့အရြယ္မေရာက္မီွလက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားေပးၿခင္းခံရသည္ ့)မိန္းကေလးတုိင္းအကုန္လံုးေတာ ့
လည္း ကံမေကာင္းနုိင္ႀကရွာပါဘူး...
ပညာမတတ္ပဲ ငယ္ငယ္ရြယ္ရြယ္ၿဖင့္အတင္းအႀကပ္လက္ထပ္ေပးၿခင္းခံရသည္ ့မိန္းကေလးမ်ားလည္းုရွိ
တတ္ႀကၿပီး တစ္ခ်ဴိ ့လွ်င္ ပုိမုိဆုိးရြားသည္ ့ဘ၀အေၿခအေနမ်ဴိးရင္ဆုိင္ႀကရပါတယ္...
မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားဟာ အတင္းအဓမၼက်င္ ့ႀကံခံႀကရၿပီး ငယ္ငယ္ရြယ္ရြယ္ႏွင္ ့ကုိယ္၀န္ေဆာင္ကာ ကေလး
ေမြးႀကရေသာေႀကာင္ ့သက္တမ္းလည္းမရွည္ႀကရရွာပါဘူး...

မည္သုိ ့ပင္ ငုိယုိကာ ေတာင္းပန္တုိးလွ်ဴိးပါေသာ္လည္း...
 အသက္ ၁၆ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ သတို ့သမီးေလး ဆူရိတ တစ္ေယာက္ သတုိ ့သားေနအိမ္သုိ ့အသြားငိုယုိေနပံု...
နီေပါနုိင္ငံမွ သူမေနထိင္သည္ ့ရြာတြင္လည္း အရြယ္မတုိင္မီလက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားၿခင္းဓေလ ့ထြန္းကားပါတယ္

Wailing in protest: Surita, 16, cries as she leaves her family home, shielded by a traditional wedding umbrella and carried in a cart to her new husband's village. Early marriage is the norm in her small village in Nepal

မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားဟာ ခင္ပြန္းၿဖစ္သူမ်ားရဲ ့ကုိယ္ထိလက္ေရာက္ႏွိပ္စက္ေစာ္ကားၿခင္းမ်ားခံႀကရၿပီး အ
သက္ေသသည္အထိရန္ရွာမည္ဟု ၿခိမ္းေၿခာက္ခံႀကရေသာေႀကာင္ ့လည္း ထြက္ေၿပးဖုိ ့ေႀကာက္ရြံ ့ခဲ ့ႀက
ပါတယ္...
ယီမင္နုိင္ငံမွ အၿဖစ္အပ်က္တစ္ခုတြင္လည္း အသက္ ၁၀ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ရွိ အုိင္ရွာ အမည္ရွိကေလးမေလးကုိ
အသက္ ၅၀ အရြယ္ရွိ အမ်ဴိးသားတစ္ဦးႏွင္ ့လက္ထပ္ေပးစားခဲ့ပါတယ္...
သူမလက္ထပ္ရမည္ ့သတုိ ့သား ( ထုိလူႀကီး ) ကုိၿမင္ရတဲ ့အခါမွာ အုိင္ရွာ ကေလးဟာေႀကာက္ရြံ ့ထိတ္
လန္ ့စြာၿဖင္ ့ေအာ္ဟစ္ငုိယုိခဲ ့ပါတယ္လို ့သူမရဲ ့အစ္မၿဖစ္သူ ဖာတီမာက သတင္းေထာက္မ်ားကုိေၿပာႀကား
ခဲ ့ပါတယ္...
တစ္စံုတစ္ေယာက္က ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ ့ကုိအေႀကာင္းႀကားခဲ ့ေပမယ္ ့အုိင္ရွာ ရဲ ့ဖခင္ၿဖစ္သူက သူမကုိအရပ္ပုိရွည္
သည္ ့ပံုေပါက္ရန္ ေဒါက္ၿမင္ ့ဖိနပ္စီးေစခဲ ့ၿပီး မ်က္ႏွာကုိမၿမင္နုိင္ေစရန္ (အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာ၀င္အမ်ဴိးသမီး
မ်ား၀တ္ရံုသည္ ့) မ်က္ႏွာဖံုးကုိပါ ၀တ္ဆင္ေစခဲ ့ပါတယ္...
အကယ္၍သူသာ အဖမ္းခံခဲ ့ရပါက ၿပန္လြတ္လာတာႏွင္ ့တစ္ၿပဳိင္နက္ အုိင္ရွာကုိသတ္ပစ္မည္ဟု သတိေပး
ၿခိမ္းေၿခာက္ခဲ ့ပါတယ္...
ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ ့လည္းမည္သုိ ့မွ်မေဆာင္ရြက္ပဲၿပန္သြားခဲ ့ရလုိ ့အုိင္ရွာခမ်ာေတာ့ယခုအခါ သူမရြာႏွင္ ့ႏွစ္နာရီအ
ႀကာေ၀းကြာသည္ ့ရြာတစ္ရြာတြင္ ခင္ပြန္းၿဖစ္သူႏွင္ ့အတူေနထုိင္လွ်က္ရွိပါတယ္...
" သူ ့မွာမုိဘုိင္းဖံုးရွိေတာ ့ေန ့တုိင္းကြ်န္မဆီဖံုးဆက္ၿပီး ငုိရွာတာပါပဲ..." လုိ ့သူမဆုိပါတယ္...

တစ္ခ်ဴိ ့ေသာၿဖစ္ရပ္မ်ားတြင္ (မိန္းကေလးမ်ား၏ ) က်န္းမာေရးအေၿခအေနမ်ား အလြန္အမင္းစုိးရိမ္ဖြယ္ရာ
အထိၿဖစ္ႀကရၿပီး တစ္ခ်ဴိ  ့ကေတာ ့အသက္ေသဆံုးသည္အေၿခအေနဆုိးေတြႀကဳံေတြ ့ခဲ ့ႀကရပါတယ္...
ယီမင္နုိင္ငံၿမဳိ ့ေတာ္ ဆနား မွဆ၇ာ၀န္တစ္ဦးရဲ ့မွတ္တမ္းမ်ားအရ မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားအား အတင္းအဓမၼ
လိင္ဆက္ဆံၿခင္း၊ အသက္အရြယ္ငယ္စဥ္မွာပင္ ကုိယ္၀န္ေဆာင္ကာသားဖြားေစၿခင္းတုိ ့ေႀကာင္ ့သားအိမ္
ထိခုိက္ပ်က္စီးကာ ဘ၀တစ္ေလွ်ာက္လံုး သားအိမ္ေလွ်ာသည္ ့ေ၀ဒနာခံစားတတ္ႀကရပါတယ္ လို ့ဆုိပါ
တယ္....
မိန္းကေလးမ်ားဟာ အိမ္ေထာင္သားေမြးၿခင္းဆုိင္ရာကုိ သိရွိနားလည္နုိင္ဖုိ ့ေတာင္အရြယ္မေရာက္ေသး၊
ငယ္ရြယ္ေသးႀကတာၿဖစ္ပါယ္...
" နင္တုိ ့ဘာၿဖစ္ေနတယ္ဆုိတာေရာသိႀကရဲ ့လား...နင္တုိ ့ဗုိက္ထဲမွာကေလးငယ္ရွိေနတယ္ဆုိတာ သိရဲ ့
လား လို ့သူနာၿပဳမ်ားက အစၿပဳေမးၿမန္းႀကရပါတယ္..." လို ့ဆရာ၀န္ကဆုိပါတယ္...

အနည္းငယ္မွ်ေသာမိန္းကေလးေတြသာ သူတုိ ့ကုိယ္သူတုိ ့မည္သုိ ့ဂရုစုိက္ရမည္၊ ေမြးလာေသာသားသမီး
မ်ားကုိ မည္သုိ ့ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင္ ့ေရွာက္ရမည္ကုိသိနားလည္ေသာေႀကာင္ ့သားသမီးမ်ားငယ္စဥ္ကပင္ေသ
ဆံုးၿခင္းနွဳံးလည္းၿမင္ ့မားလာရပါတယ္...
ထုိကဲ ့သို ့တရားမ၀င္လက္ထပ္ထိမ္းၿမားေပးၿခင္းမ်ားအားတားဆီးကာကြယ္ၿခင္း၊ အမ်ဴိးသမီးမ်ား၏ဘ၀ေန
ထုိင္မွဳအဆင္ ့အတန္းၿမင္ ့မားေစရန္ အခ်ိန္ၿပည္ ့ကူညီေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ားကေတာ့ မိန္းကေလးငယ္မ်ားအား
( ထုိအၿဖစ္ဆုိးမွ ) ကယ္တင္နုိင္ဖုိ ့ႀကဳိးပမ္းခ်က္ကေတာ ့အလြန္ခက္ခဲလွမည္ဆုိတာသိရွိနားလည္သေဘာ
ေပါက္ထားႀကပါတယ္...

Wide-eyed and haunted, the expressions on these young girls' faces hint at the innocence so cruelly snatched away from them.
They should be playing, learning and enjoying their childhood. But instead these youngsters have been forced to grow up before they have even reached puberty.
Girls as young as five are being married off in secret weddings. It is estimated that every year ten to 12 million girls in the developing world are married off.

In India, the girls will typically be attached to boys four or five years older. In Yemen, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and other countries with high early marriage rates, the husbands may be young men or middle-aged widowers or abductors who rape first and claim their victims as wives afterwards.
Some of these marriages are business transactions or to resolve a family feud.
Forced early marriage thrives in many regions, often in defiance of national laws. Whole communities often prescribe to the notion that it is as an appropriate way for a young woman to grow up when the alternative is the risk she loses her virginity to someone besides a husband.
Wedding ceremonies are often held in the middle of the night, with the whole village keeping the secret for fear it might be interrupted by police.
In a project for National Geographic, journalist Cynthia Gorney and photographer Stephanie Sinclair travelled to Yemen and Rajasthan in India to investigate the shocking practice.
In India girls may not legally marry before age 18 - but ceremonies involving girls in their teens may be overlooked. The younger daughters, as young as five, tend to be added on discreetly, their names kept off the invitations.
In one case in Rajasthan where her teenage sisters were also being married, a five-year-old bride named Rajani fell asleep before her wedding ceremony began.
An uncle lifted her from her cot and carried her in the moonlight toward the Hindu priest and future husband - a ten-year-old boy. Although child brides tend to remain with their families until they are older, this is not always the case.
Three years ago, the case of Nujood Ali came to worldwide attention. The ten-year-old Yemeni girl managed to escape her home and made her way to a courthouse to request a divorce from the man in his 30s her father had forced her to marry and who beat her.
She became the poster girl for children in her position around the world and a recent book, translated into 30 languages - I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced. She is now back with her family and has returned to school.
Not all girls have such a lucky escape. Few who are married off as children have any chance of an education but there are far worse consequences.
Many are raped and have a low life expectancy due to the number of children they carry at such a young age.

Girls suffer physical abuse and are too frightened to escape because they are threatened with death.
In another case in Yemen, it was discovered that a ten-year-old girl Ayesha had been married off to a 50-year-old man.
The journalists were told by her sister Fatima that 'little Ayesha screamed when she saw the man she was to marry'.
Someone alerted the police, but Ayesha's father ordered her to put on high heels to look taller and a veil to hide her face.
He warned that if he was sent to jail, he would kill Ayesha when he got out. The police left without troubling anyone and Ayesha now lived in a village two hours away with her husband.

'She has a mobile phone,' Fatima said. 'Every day, she calls me and cries.'
The medical consequences are also extremely serious and in some cases fatal.
One doctor based in the Yemeni capital Sanaa listed some of the medical consequences of forcing girls into sex and childbirth before they are physically mature - ripped vaginal walls and internal ruptures called fistulas which can lead to life-long incontinence.

Girls are often too young to understand the concept of reproduction. The doctor said: 'The nurses start by asking, ''Do you know what's happening?'" Do you understand that this is a baby that has been growing inside of you?''
Few are equipped with the information of how to care for themselves or their babies after childbirth leading to high infant mortality rates.
The people who work full-time trying to prevent these illegal marriages, and to improve women's lives, know that it is a far from simple plan of rescuing girls. 
Molly Melching, the founder of a Senegal-based organisation Tostan, told National Geographic: 'If we separate a girl and isolate her from her community, what will her life be like?

'You don't want to encourage girls to run away. The way you change social norms is not by fighting them or humiliating people and saying they're backward. We've seen that an entire community can choose very quickly to change. It's inspiring.'