Israeli police stop wedding of 14-year-old girl moments before ceremony and arrest father of the bride
Officers arrest the groom and father of the bride
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Your support makes all the difference.The wedding of a 14-year-old girl to a man in his twenties was stopped moments before the ceremony was due to begin by police in the Israeli city of Lod.
Officers arrested the father of the bride, a rabbi in the Breslov Hasidic community, who had planned to carry out the wedding himself. The groom was also detained.
The pair were later released on conditional house arrest, according to The Times of Israel.
Representatives from the local welfare ministry later admitted to Channel 2, that there was no way to monitor whether the religious wedding ceremony would be covertly arranged at a later date.
Israel’s minimum marriageable age is 18, raised from 17 in 2013. This can only be contravened with special permission granted by a family court.
A 2016 report by the Israeli parliament or Knesset’s Law and Justice Committee found 716 underage marrages in 2014/15. Of these 517 of these were performed under sharia law, with the rest mostly in Jerusalem’s ulta-Orthodox community.
However, it found only 37 of these cases were investigated.
Girls Not Brides, the international non-governmental organisation with the mission to end child marriage throughout the world says that "girls frequently feel disempowered and are deprived of their fundamental rights to health, education and safety", when they get married at a young age.
"Child brides face huge challenges as a result of being married as children. Isolated, often with their freedom curtailed," it says.
"Neither physically nor emotionally ready to become wives and mothers, child brides are at greater risk of experiencing dangerous complications in pregnancy and childbirth, contracting HIV/AIDS and suffering domestic violence. With little access to education and economic opportunities, they and their families are more likely to live in poverty."
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