Something Good That Comes From Television

Something Good That Comes From Television

Well, there are actually a number of good things that come from television, but I'm in a foul mood about an instrument that largely works for the benefit of ideologies built around emotion. So I was pleased to see this February 3, 2009 Time article that explains how a little girl finally was freed from continual rape:

Nujood Ali is just 10 years old — and was, until recently, the youngest known divorced person in the world.
Slender with thick hair and a shy smile, Ali made headlines in Yemen last April when she walked out on a man more than three times her age, to whom her father had married her off. It was an act driven by terror and despair. (See the top 10 crime stories of 2008.)
Nujood's ordeal began last February, when the family gathered to celebrate her wedding to a motorcycle deliveryman in his 30s. She first set eyes on the groom when she took her marriage vows. After spending her wedding night with her parents and 15 brothers and sisters, Nujood was taken by her new husband to his family village, where, she says, he beat and raped her every night. After two nightmarish months he allowed her to visit her parents, who rebuffed her pleas to end the marriage.
Nujood finally found her moment to escape one day, when her mother gave her a few pennies and sent her out to buy bread. Instead she took a bus to the center of the capital, Sanaa — a city of 3 million people — where she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the courthouse. She had never been inside a courtroom but had once seen one on television, she says, and knew it was a place where people went for help. There she sat silently on a bench, uncertain as to what to do, while crowds of people scurried past, scarcely glancing at the quiet child. It was only once the courthouse emptied during the lunch recess that the judge noticed her and asked why she was there. "I came for a divorce," she told him. Horrified, he took her to his house to play with his 8-year-old daughter, and granted the divorce two days later.

And this wasn't an anomaly, but a recurring problem of a certain religion:

Despite Yemen's laws against child marriage, about 52% of Yemen's girls marry before the age of 18, often as the second or third wives of far older men. Worldwide, child marriage has been slow to change, according to UNICEF's "State of the World's Children" report released last month. About 49% of South Asian women in their early 20s were married before the age of 18, according to statistics gathered by UNICEF, which links early marriage to high rates of infant death and maternal mortality in very poor countries. "Often families marry off girls very young because they want to protect them, not realizing the dangers they face," says Stella Schumacher, a UNICEF child-protection specialist in New York. "It requires a change of social norms. Legislation is not enough."

Something that a lot of people don't know--indeed, I didn't know, until reading Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity--is that Christianity made a very fundamental change to the status of women, by discouraging child marriage. Roman law allowed girls as young as 12 to be married (and this is a time when 12 year olds were still little girls--puberty arrived much later because of poor nutrition), and the law was frequently ignored. And these weren't "let's have the ceremony and well wait for sex until you grow up" marriages. Christianity strongly disapproved of this early and forced marriage, to the emotional and physical benefit of young women.