What message are we sending here, folks?
Oh my gosh! I’m so nervous! My first post on a new blog! <hurls in background>
Okay, now that that’s over with, let’s get to the point of this discussion. Some of you may remember about 2 years ago a story broke of a young Yemen girl who wanted to divorce her husband. Sounds normal enough until you dig deeper and see that the young girl was only 10 years old at the time and that her husband was more than 4 times her senior. As it turns out, Nujood Ali was sold into marriage by her impoverished father who could no longer afford to keep her in the family. He sold her to a man under the premise that he not try anything sexual with her until she reached puberty. Not surprisinginly, the man did not keep his promise to Nujood’s father and soon he was forcing her to have sex and sleep with him even when she begged not to.
In the wake of her divorce hearings, Nujood was honored and plastered all over the TV screens and the media. She was honored as a Woman of the Year in 2008 by Glamour magainze and interviewed by countless numbers of media outlets.
Two years later however, Nujood is not attending the private school that foreign benefactors are paying for and she is not doing much of anything. Instead, she’s refusing to see a psychiatrist and staying very, very angry at the whole situation.
Don’t get me wrong, this young girl has every right to be mad. What angers me is that instead of quietly getting this girl help behind the scenes, society chose to exploit her and put her story on as many cover pages as possible. Something that instead of helping, seems to only have hurt the child. Sure, she’s no longer married to a man four times her senior, but her life is forever changed and she’s changed. She claims she can’t go to school because every where she goes she’s taunted and treated badly. She claims she’s angry because she can’t live a normal life. This story and so many other stories of children who are abused and then exploited absolutely breaks my heart.
At what point do we stop hurting those we’re trying to help and start helping? Nujood Ali didn’t need to be a Woman of the Year to get a divorce. And she didn’t need to do 1,000 TV interviews. She needed some quiet saviors to come in and help and not ask for recognition of their good deeds. We all want the pat on the back that lets us know someone else thinks we did the right thing, but in the end, what message are we sending to people like Nujood Ali and others who end up in her situation and then are forgotten when the cameras are off?
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First off, yes, what happened to Ms. Ali was certainly horrific, and I can’t stand the fact that there still to this day are societies where it’s deemed either necessary or okay to sell someone’s own offspring into marriage in return for money (and I’m not even sure if money was involved).
However, the fact that now that Nujood is out of her terrible situation, but simply hasn’t achieved the level of attention she was hoping for, doesn’t mean that she gets to just throw her hands up and proclaim that life’s too hard for her now.
That’s not to say that the media doesn’t share part of this blame either (which is common, naturally): exploiting this girl’s story simply to garner attention (Glamour? Seriously?) just doesn’t jive with me.
So, I dunno, I say the media has to back off, and Nujood really just needs to suck it up, and plow through (with help, if she’ll get over herself and take it) whatever problems lie ahead of her. Sorry, but this sort of stuff goes on everyday, and while it may not be acceptable, and may not always turn out well for everyone, it seems that this little girl has people willing to help her, she just needs to accept that help, and those people helping shouldn’t necessarily expect a Nobel Peace Prize in return.
I agree. I am not trying in any way to lessen the severity of what happened to this young girl. Instead, I’m more pissed at the fact that she doesn’t feel like it’s enough and that there are people all over the world who are suffering through the same if not worse than she is and they are not getting their face plastered all over the media and they are not getting the help she has so graciously been given.
Part of my problem with this is that we’re so quick to jump on the bandwagon to help something when it’s front and center in the media but we’re less likely to help when it sits in our own backyard. I think instead of the media over-reporting on this story, it would have been nice to see “places where you can help in your neighborhood” or something like that. Give me information I can use instead of just telling me a sad story.
I’m glad she got help, I think it’s great that people were moved by her story and reached out to her, but at the same time, I wish that people took more time to solve the problems in their own neighborhoods and that we started focusing on our own communities first.
I definitely agree with you about how it’d be nice if people took to their own communities the same way they do when someone or something is front and center in the media.
By the way, I think you may have linked to it in bgtwt, but, was there just one article about this girl that prompted this post, or were there in others you read from other outlets about the incident?
As soon a people stop finding stories like these interesting, the media might stop covering them. There is little chance of that happening, especially in strange cases like Nujood’s. I mean, that’s news! I’d like to read more about it. That is the problem.
Well, I guess the real problem is the old fucko molester. Or Nujood’s father. But after those guys, it’s everyone tuning in to these media outlets and putting any kind of interest in Glamour.
I read some other articles to get a good base of information for my post. I just googled her name.
But the post was basically prompted by the CNN article yesterday which can be found here http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/08/26/yemen.divorce/index.html?iref=newssearch
Please ignore my terrible knowledge of web coding stuff and just excuse the fact that I just posted an entire link in my comment….
Anyway, it was mostly brought on by that article and then remembering about the story and googling her name.
And, very valid point James. As soon as we stop giving so much attention to these one-off stories, the media will start to cover them less.
I guess I’m a little confused on the back story. From the blog it sounds like she says she didn’t want the help (refusing school and psychiatry), but from the comments it sounds like she wants more help (“she doesn’t feel like it’s enough”).
Either way, I think blaming media won’t help. Like James said, you can’t stop them from covering things that draw viewers.
In the overarching issue of selling young girls in to marriage, and allowing men to rape them, obviously there are things that can be done, and I think getting her story out as much as possible is actually a good way to effect change. It helps to put a face and story on an issue to try and get public backing.
In her specific scenario, I think the only way to actually help her get better is to not blame things on her. My ideas change depending on whether she wants help or not (see first paragraph), but I think it is not her fault for getting raped, it is not her fault that people wanted to help her, it is not her fault for wanting to reject the help (or get a different type of help), and it is not her fault for being angry and feeling like she is constantly taunted. If people really wanted to help her get better, they would try different types of help until they found one she didn’t reject.
The back story isn’t very clear….
She has been offered help from foreign benefactors; they are paying for her schooling so that she can go to a private school, but she refuses to go because she says that the school kids make fun of her or taunt her. She’s been offered the ability to go speak to a psychiatrist but has refused that too. I’m not exactly sure what more she is wanting from other people; I mean, she got the divorce, she was offered an education and help. And she got fame in the mist of all that. I’m not sure what else she is wanting.
I wouldn’t say I’m blaming the media. My frustration is more with the lack of focus on these types of issues in our own back yard. Why do we continue to cover a story in Yemen when young girls are being raped and abused right here?
What I’m getting from this is I’m thinking as she is only 10 she is too young to understand how this is all affecting her. After all she got raped, was sold by her family. It sounds more like a confused child who doesn’t know how to handle all these emotions, than someone who acknowledges the help but refuses because they just want to be difficult.
Abused kids that I’ve dealt with at a young age have this habit of pushing out any kind of help, because they don’t know how to handle it all. They don’t know how to get help in a sense because they can’t comprehend it and all that has happened to them.