State Sanctioned Pedophilia

8-Year-Old Girl Not Old Enough to Divorce Husband, 58

A Saudi court has ruled that an 8-year-old girl who is married to a 58-year-old man cannot divorce her husband until she is older.
After the girl's father married her off for a £5,000 dowry, the girl's mother, who is separated from her husband, filed for divorce on behalf of her daughter. "The judge has dismissed the plea because she does not have the right to file such a case, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty," said lawyer Abdullah Jtili. Relatives say the father and husband have a verbal agreement that the marriage will not be consummated until the girl turns 18, and she still lives with her mother.

COMMENT: I'm glad she lives with mom, and it's oh-so-nice that dad and the husband have a verbal agreement, but I suspect when push-come-to-shove, if the hubby wants that marriage consummated, he'll do it, verbal agreement or no. This stinks. -NefariousNewt

8-Year-Old...

"She doesn't know yet that she has been married," lawyer Jtili said then of the girl who was about to begin her fourth year at primary school.
Saudi Court...

Dear friends, our lives are too dark for you to even imagine. Scores of young girls are too timid to deny the wishes of their parents and too often marry men who are of an advanced age to be grandfathers. Once legally bound, these young girls feel as though they have no choice but to do this man’s bidding. They leap to fulfil his every wish. In the dark of their bedrooms, they have sexual intercourse with men whom they fear! The thought of such pitiful lives lived in perpetual dread is too much to even imagine. The physical attacks women in Arabia endure are accompanied by mental abuse.

From an early age, female children come to realize that their lives pale in comparison with that of male children. This is a cruel existence, even if there is no physical abuse. To always feel that your status is undesirable creates a distressing sadness in our young women. If you ever have occasion to witness the behavior of an Arab women, most likely you will notice that they will respond in a bashful, hesitate manner. This is a direct result from their childhood lessons that their thoughts, dreams and wishes do not matter.

Even in my own family, a family that rules the land, there are women who are beaten and sexually assaulted by the men who are responsible for their well-being. This happens frequently, even though in my religion it is forbidden for a man to behave in the manner too many Saudi men believe is their God given right. Letter from a Saudi Princess

People Power (part 1)

I resolve to...share my knowledge
by John Mighton

People who find math easy don't always make the best teachers. The essence of math has become so obvious to them that they can have trouble seeing why their students are struggling.

I struggled at math myself. As a teenager I read a fair number of biographies of scientists & mathematicians. They always gave me the impression that a person had to be born with a gift to do math, & that someone who had this gift would never do badly on a test or have a hard time learning a concept. This was something I learned to believe deeply.

Like many young people, I would often give up on things because I was afraid I would meet my limitations. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I had the courage to go back to school to study math.

Ten years ago I was looking for a way to give something back to my community. It occurred to me that I could do this by trying to help kids who were having trouble with the math I was finally able to grasp.

Because of my own background, I wasn't inclined to blame students or think they were stupid if they couldn't move forward. If someone didn't understand my explanation, I assumed there was something wrong with my explanation, not with my students.

Many of my closest friends are actors who often have time on their hands & will do anything for attention. So I convinced some of them, even those who had dropped math, that they could be math tutors. We started an after-school tutoring program called JUMP in my apartment.

The JUMP program was founded on a very lucky accident. I asked the principal of a local school to send me some kids who were having trouble with math. She misunderstood me & delivered some of the most challenged students in her school, including a number of kids in special education classes who were performing far below grade level.

Working with these students has been one of the most inspiring things I've done. I'm now convinced the brain can develop new abilities more readily than traditional theories of intelligence allow, & that even children who face severe challenges in subjects like math are capable of far more than we expect of them.

Many of the students from the first few years of JUMP moved into academic math classes by the time they entered high school. Thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteers & teachers, JUMP materials & methods are now being used in many schools in Canada, Britain, the United States & South Africa.

Most complex systems in nature show emergent behaviour: new & unexpected properties of the system can emerge out of nowhere from a series of small changes. If you add a reagent to a chemical solution one drop at a time, nothing may happen until suddenly, with a single drop, the whole solution changes colour.

I've seen this kind of behaviour in hundreds of students; they can appear to be at the limits of their ability, & then, with a single drop of knowledge, they leap to a new level of understanding.

Given the enormity of the world's challenges, I've often felt that nothing I did could make a difference. But thankfully, the world itself is complex & prone to emergent behaviour. If you're willing to take the first step, or add the first drop, the ripples may spread more widely than you could have imagined.

(John Mighton is a playwright & mathematician. He is the founder of JUMP, a charity whose goal is to reduce poverty by helping children succeed in math. CanStage is remounting his play Half Life at the Bluma Appel Theatre in January.)

I resolve to...share my knowledge
by John Mighton
NOW Magazine
Jan.07