Australia’s Child Bride Problem.

In early February 2014 I first saw a story in the Guardian, this story consisted of a Muslim doctor in Sydney who was fed up. She was fed up with young girls coming into her surgery pregnant at 13 and 14 years of age. When asked who got them pregnant the answer was always the same – their husbands.

The doctor’s name is Dr Eman Sharobeem. I notice she has since set up a “child bride hotline” – something I never thought we’d need in this country – in order to try and stem the tide of young girls being married or sometimes sold into these slave-like arrangements.

Dr Eman Sharobeem has spent almost a decade working with victims of forced marriage in Australia. So you can imagine her surprise back in july of the same year when the federal government spent almost $500,000 in grants to address the problems of child marriage in Australia on Islamic religious and academic bodies and bypassed her completely.

I would surmise this is more in line with the federal government plan of paying Islamic institutions to thwart odious cultural problems themselves, rather than the government having to step in to do it, as we’ve seen with the distribution of $1 million “anti-terror” funds to Islamic schools and Mosques around the country in recent times. At least they can be seen to be doing something I guess.

At around the same time that Dr Sharobeem was denied funds for her already trialed measures to counter the child bride issue, and her opening of a hotline for child brides who wanted help, a 26 year old Pakistani man was being arrested for having an ongoing sexual relationship with a girl who was only 12. He was arrested in the attempt to try and secure her guardianship.

Apparently the man was quite shocked to learn that he was doing something wrong, as the girl was his wife.

In the wake of the man’s arrest the Community Services Minister Pru Goward was interviewed on 2GB and suggested that forced child marriages were in fact “quite common”.

‘I understand there are actually a significant number of unlawful, unregistered marriages to under-aged girls in NSW, particularly in western Sydney, south-west Sydney and the Blue Mountains,’ she said.

Of course one must surmise that while the law of the land considers these under-aged girls to be unlawfully married Islam does not. And with the influx in recent years of Sharia courts to oversee “marriage counselling” – many of which are also celebrants – these women are literally living in a world of their communities, or more correctly Islam’s making.

Police say there are possibly hundreds of such cases right now across Australia that they know nothing about, and are not reported because the Muslim community does not see there to be any problem with the practice.

In fact between 2011 and 2014 there have been 60 such cases found in the Sydney region alone.

Sam Harris recently gave an interview with Maajid Nawaz on the ABC’s Lateline. One of Sam’s more pointed statements was “If you ask the question ‘What is ISIS doing that Mohammed wouldn’t have approved of?’ … The example of Mohammed as an exemplar of the faith doesn’t square very well with modern values. He was a warlord who did many of the things you see ISIS doing, and that is why they can justify what they are doing with a very literal reading of Islamic Theology and that’s a very inconvenient fact which we have to confront head on.”

The problem being is that the Muslim community as a whole is confirming what many of their critics have been saying all along. Islam IS Islamism despite the clever wordplay. There can be little doubt that these girls are not being married to men twice and thrice their age in a bubble.

Consider the logistics. One needs a man who is willing to marry the girl, parents of the girl, and an Imam/Celebrant to perform the marriage. All of these people need to somehow meet, and engage the topic without anyone involved calling the authorities. And apparently this has happened “hundreds of times” without any authority being called to stop it ever.

My suggestion is not without merit. As Dr Sharobeem herself said “It’s not secret within our communities. It’s maybe secret to the eyes of the rest of the Australian community”.

And how this happens is simple. Mohammed did it, Mohammed is the ultimate personification of what God wants human beings to be like, therefore we should all do it too – anything less is not Islam. There can be no Islam without Mohammed’s example.

One must look at Rotherham in the UK and wonder if our own police force are worried that they too will be considered “racists” or “bigots” and therefore do nothing ? Or perhaps they are merely uninformed or powerless to police the problem.

Although, one must see that shutting down sharia courts and making them specifically illegal would rob these would-be husbands of the Islamic legal tradition that must accompany these kinds of marriages.

And so we are left with the child-bride issue here in Australia with the government doing little of use about it. Giving money to people with no necessity of outcome, or pronouncement of use for the grants. All the while sharia courts look after any “legal issues” or problems with these arrangements, as they too have been allowed to flourish.

So my question is where in this are all of the Feminists?

The grand Cabal of women who advocate for the rights of women, the rights of any minority that are willing to pump a fist in the air at the required time and place ? The very people who have for decades built up an almost Orwellian control of the media for idiotic causes like “The Air Conditioning is Sexist” and “The gender wage gap” cannot seem to be found on real issues like this.

They are silent. As silent as the young girls forced into sexual slavery at the behest of men who wrote books detailing that slavery 1400 years ago.

After all, for the 18 to 20-something university student being a dissident feminist can be fun and identity affirming, the biggest question being put to many of them is what colour to make their hair this week.

However, when confronted with the harsh realities of life outside of university and their online echo chambers, I suppose it can be a little too “real”.