WATCH: 11-Year-Old Yemeni Girl “would rather die than get married at this age”

A video uploaded to YouTube of 11 year old Nada Al-Ahdal from Yemen has been doing the rounds the last few days. In the video Nada talks about how she has to run away from home in order to avoid being married off by her parents.

“They told me that I am engaged, and that my fiance had already paid them money and brought the engagement ring. They said that I couldn’t leave, and even threatened to kill me if I went back to my uncle.”

In the video, she explains how she would be “better of dead”

According to Mashable:

“Some statistics can help put her story in context: According to the United Nations, one out of nine girls in developing countries will be married by age 15, and an estimated 14.2 million girls a year will probably become child brides in the next decade.

In Yemen, about half of all women are married as children, Human Rights Watch reports. Furthermore, there is no legal minimum age for marriage in Yemen, which leaves many girls, such as Nada, vulnerable to marital rape, abuse, poverty, and myriad health issues.

In an interview with National Geographic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Stephanie Sinclair explains that child marriage “isn’t just harmful to the girls involved. It’s at the root of so many other societal ills: poverty, disease, maternal mortality, infant mortality, violence against women.”

The Internet has helped give this girl a voice that is now being heard all around the globe. But it is important to remember that there are many other children just like her who cannot escape their fate, and whose faces do not appear in videos, and whose names we’ll never know.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J7_TKgw1To