Free Republic

Screengrab from a video shot as revellers realize Hamas gunmen are attacking. Girls were raped beside the corpses of their friends. In 2021, we were part of a grassroots team which rescued 400 women from Afghanistan. We have all, together and separately, worked on a range of feminist issues including rape, sex trafficking, honor killing, child marriage, and forced veiling. Together with thousands of other women, we have signed countless petitions and resolutions calling for freedom, justice, and safety for women globally. We cannot understand the feminist silence about what is happening to civilian Israelis in general and to Israeli...

Standing outside the local police station in her village in northeast India, 19-year-old Nureja Khatun is anxious. Cradling her 6-month-old baby in her arms, she has been waiting to catch a glimpse of her husband before the police take him away to court. Nearly an hour later, she sees her husband, Akbar Ali, for just a few seconds when he is shuffled into a police van. An officer slams the door in her face before she is able to get any answers. “Please release my husband. Otherwise take me into custody as well,” she pleaded. Khatun’s husband is one of...

A Republican-proposed bill in Tennessee would remove the age limit for when couple's could exchange wedding vows and clear the way for 'common-law marriages' between 'one man and one woman.' Representative Tom Leatherwood, 65, of Arlington, introduced the bill into the state's House that would eliminate the current age requirement of 17 and allow for 'alternative forms of marriage' to those who 'conscientiously object to the current pathway to marriage.' 'So, all this bill does is give an alternative form of marriage for those pastors and other individuals who have a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in...

Full title: 20,000 Sign Petition Demanding BBC Remove ‘Pleasure Marriages’ Expose On How Iraqi Muslim Clerics Sell Little Girls for Sex“According to Sharia, there’s no problem [with child marriages for sexual pleasure],” said one cleric. Of course not, they are following Muhammad, “the perfect example” whose favorite wife Aisha was six years old when he married her, nine when he consummated the marriage. Related: Undercover with Imams: little girls sold for sex in temporary ‘pleasure marriages’ that can last as little as an hour – cleric says ‘no problem at all’ to wed a nine-year-old As Robert Spencer points out:...

When the Supreme Court destroyed the institution of marriage in one fell swoop with the Obergefell V. Hodges ruling, liberals, and LGBT advocates mocked us for predicting the slippery slope we now find ourselves on. Our children are growing up in a world where gender is supposedly fluid (unless we’re using it to get what we want) and love is whatever we want it to be. It was only a matter of time before the insanity of the culture would set the stage for pedophilia follow on the coattails of homosexuality and become a normalized sexual orientation. Under the so-called...

While the U.S. government advances policies to prevent child marriage in foreign countries, it approves thousands of petitions filed by Americans seeking spouse or fiancé visas for children born abroad. In the last decade more than 8,500 petitions for spousal entry into the U.S. involved minors, according to government figures included in a Senate Homeland Security report

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Naila Amin was only thirteen years old when she was married off to her Pakistani first cousin twice her age who beat and raped her. “He dragged me about twenty feet - the whole length of the house - by my hair,” she relates. “He began kicking me in the head and it was so hard I saw stars.”She described how, “My mother would watch my husband and my father kick me together in the...

A row over how to deal with child marriage among immigrants has inflamed political debate ahead of a general election in Sweden, where migration continues to divide public opinion and the far right is riding high in the polls. A tug-of-war between the ruling Social Democrat-Green Party coalition and the opposition over the government’s role in managing or eradicating the practice — which predominantly affects young girls, and in some cases boys, from immigrant backgrounds — is emblematic of a broader struggle to find a balance between efforts to integrate a large number of new immigrants and preserve a Swedish...

ANKARA, Turkey (AFP) — Turkey’s religious affairs state agency came under heavy criticism on Thursday from the main opposition party after it said girls as young as nine could marry under Islamic law. The Diyanet religious affairs directorate said on Tuesday the minimum age for girls to marry was nine, while for boys it was 12, according to Turkish media including the Hurriyet daily quoting the agency’s official website. The post, which took the form of an explanatory statement on Islamic law, has since been taken down, after a backlash from the opposition and women’s rights groups. The head of...

Diyanet said: Girls nine, males can marry 12 years old According to the Directorate of Religious Affairs (DÄ°B), nine daughters and 12 boys can be married. In this respect, it is mentioned that the women who entered the age of adolescence can also be married after talking about the provisions and benefits of the marriage. However, the Diyanet said in the page that "Marriage, which is not officially registered, is a crime by law. The statement reads as follows: "Without the wife of the woman who has reached the age of the Bulgah, it is possible for her to be...

John Haller is in Facebook prison. Clearly, he must be saying the right things. Help spread the word and get his message out. We may be experiencing to advent of two classic novels in our lifetime. Were Orwell and Rand modern day prophets? Consider this: In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, the Thought Police (Thinkpol) are the secret police of the superstate Oceania, who discover and punish "thoughtcrimes" which are defined as personal and political thoughts unapproved by "the Party." Thinkpol used criminal psychology and omnipresent surveillance to monitor and arrest all citizens of "Oceania" who would commit...

A 47-year-old man has been charged with raping a 14-year-old Houston-area girl who investigators say told a doctor she was his wife and they were having sex. Fort Bend County jail records Steven Carty was being held Thursday on a charge of aggravated sexual assault of a child, with bond at $100,000. The girl’s 39-year-old mother was charged with endangering a child by criminal negligence, with bond at $10,000.

When she was a scrawny 11-year-old, Sherry Johnson found out one day that she was about to be married to a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her. “It was forced on me,” she recalls. She had become pregnant, she says, and child welfare authorities were investigating — so her family and church officials decided the simplest way to avoid a messy criminal case was to organize a wedding. “My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?'” Johnson remembers today,...

Chelsea Clinton on Monday insisted that issues such as global warming and child marriage were interconnected. Clinton was speaking at the 2017 CARE National Conference when she urged attendees to "carry multiple concerns in both our head and our heart." Other speakers at the D.C. event included Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and another former first daughter, Barbara Bush

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie conditionally vetoed legislation Thursday that would have banned all underage marriage in New Jersey. The bill aimed to change current New Jersey law, which permits 16- and 17-year-olds to get married with parental consent and those under the age of 16 to marry with the approval of a family court judge. A republican sponsored the bill, but Christie stood in opposition, citing religious freedom and noting the age of consent in New Jersey is 16, reports Politico. Unchained At Last, a non-profit group that seeks to help women in arranged and forced marriages, estimates there...

A 14-year-old child bride from Syria came to Sweden and became pregnant with her husband, who is also her cousin. Now a Swedish court has approved of her marriage, because she appears "mature," and for religious and cultural reasons. The girl was married off to a cousin when she was only twelve years old. In Sweden, she has been placed with his aunt and her family. The social service authorities in Sweden thought her marriage is completely outrageous and took it to the justice system. But the judge does not think there is anything wrong with it, since she was...

A 14-year-old child bride from Syria came to Sweden and became pregnant with her husband, who is also her cousin. Now a Swedish court has approved of her marriage, because she appears "mature," and for religious and cultural reasons. The girl was married off to a cousin when she was only twelve years old. In Sweden, she has been placed with his aunt and her family. The social service authorities in Sweden thought her marriage is completely outrageous and took it to the justice system. But the judge does not think there is anything wrong with it, since she was...

Child Marriage, No-go Zones, Gang Rapes ..... October 1. Two migrants raped a 23-year-old woman in Lüneburg as she was walking in a park with her young child. The men, who remain at large, forced the child to watch while they took turns assaulting the woman. October 2. A 19-year-old migrant raped a 90-year-old woman as she was leaving a church in downtown Düsseldorf. Police initially described the suspect as "a Southern European with North African roots." It later emerged that the man is a Moroccan with a Spanish passport. October 2. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble called for the development...

A Turkish government proposal which would pardon some people imprisoned for statutory rape in the past decade has fallen short of passage by legislators. The proposal would defer sentencing or punishment for sexual assault in cases where there was no force and where the victim and perpetrator were married. Following the defeat late Thursday, the government is bringing the proposal back for consideration next week. An earlier law, abolished in 2005, said there is no crime if the couple marry. …

Germany’s justice minister is proposing legislation which would dissolve child marriages, with limited exceptions in cases where spouses are at least 16. Amid the recent influx of migrants to Germany, authorities are seeing a growing number of minors who claim to be married. The exact figure of child marriages in Germany isn’t known, but officials estimate there are more than 1,000. …