JOHANNESBURG (AP) —The 14-year-old girl had just arrived home from school when her family told her to swap her school uniform for traditional wedding robes. While she had been sitting in her seventh grade classroom in South Africa, her male relatives had received a $570 bride price for her from a man she’d never met who was twice her age.
As is the case with many child brides, beatings and rape were common in her new marital home. After a number of failed escape attempts, she finally made it over a fence and ran to the nearest police station. She then filed charges for the case that would become the first criminal prosecution of child marriage in South Africa.
An estimated 125 million African girls are child brides, with that number expected to rise to 310 million by 2050, creating a legacy of “lost childhoods and shattered futures,” according to a report released by UNICEF on Thursday that demanded more aggressive government actions to end the practice on the continent.
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