Child brides by the thousands

KADUNA, Nigeria (AP):

By the time she ran away, she bore the scars of an abused woman anywhere - a swollen face, a starved body, and, barely a year after her wedding, a divorce. But for Maimuna Abdullahi, it all happened by the time she was 14.

Maimuna is one of thousands of divorced girls in Nigeria, who were forced into marriage and have since run away or been thrown out by their husbands.

They are victims of a belief that girls should get wed rather than educated, which led Boko Haram terrorists to abduct more than 200 schoolgirls two months ago and threaten to marry them off.

"I'm too scared to go back home," Maimuna whispers, as she fiddles nervously with her hands. "I know they will force me to go back to my husband."

Her former husband, Mahammadu Saidu, 28, does not deny beating her, and blames her few years of school for her disobedience.

"She had too much ABCD," he says. "Too much ABCD."

Nigeria has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, despite a law that sets the age of consent at 18. The custom of child marriage is still ingrained enough that even a federal senator has married five child brides and divorced one.

Across the country, one in five girls marry before 15, according to the United Nations. In the poor Muslim north, where child marriage is often considered acceptable under shariah or Islamic law, that number goes up to one in two. Some child brides are as young as nine.

There are no official numbers for just how many of these girls get divorced, leaving them destitute, but they are all too visible. A few miles away, girls Maimuna's age and younger are selling their bodies to truck drivers.

"Nobody knows how many thousands of them there are," says Saadatu Aliyu, the founder of a private school for divorced girls that Maimuna now attends. "That's why we have so many prostitutes, and very young ones, in the north."

WAY OF LIFE

At 45, Maimuna's father, Haruna Abdullahi, has been married for 30 years and has fathered eight children. He says his culture allows girls to go to their husbands' houses from the age of 12. His wife, Rabi Abdullahi, was a child bride, although she does not know exactly how old.

"It is our way of life," she says. "In my day, a bride would never dare to run away."

In this desperately poor region, a child marriage brings in a bride price and means one less mouth to feed. So in late 2012, Maimuna's father arranged to marry his eldest daughter to his best friend's eldest son. The son, Saidu, paid a dowry of $210 - more cash than Abdullahi has had in his life.