A 14-year-old Nigerian girl, who was forced to marry a 35-year-old man, poisoned him and his friends using rat poison. According to a Nigerian Police spokesperson, she purchased the rat poison and then diluted it in the water used to cook his meal.  Wasila Umaru confessed to police that she murdered her husband, Umaru Sani, and three of his friends because she was being forced to marry a man she didn’t love.  At 14 what does a child even understand about love?  One can only imagine the fear a 14-year-old girl might experience being forced to marry a grown man.  But not really a man, a child molester, a rapist.  And I am in no way interested in being told that it’s cultural and I’m looking at this from American eyes.  Some things are universally wrong and the rape of young girls under the guise of marriage is one of them.

It’s absolutely insane that in 2014, girls, barely teenagers, should be forced to marry.  Many of these young brides die during childbirth or suffer severe health issues that leave them incapable of having children.  It’s time for the free, civilized world, not on the basis of racism, or ethnocentrism but on the basis of justice, to call for the end of such practices.  According to the United Nations Population fund, 48% of Nigerian girls are married by the time they are 15 and 78% are married by the time they are 18.  This practice of female child marriage/rape is just another way that male dominated societies ensure that the women they marry are virgins.  And that desire/requirement, stems from the fact that these men are inferior, uneducated, unintelligent and they take advantage of young girls because it’s the only power they possess.  Someone needed to say it and now it’s been said.