A Child Bride Got ‘Married’ In Times Square And People Were Not Impressed

By Lydia Morrish

A man and his new bride, dressed in all white everything, hold hands and posing for the cameras in Times Square… It would be a perfectly normal scene if the man, aged 65, hadn’t just “married” a girl who is 12 years old.

This is his new “child bride”. Passersby shout abuse at the old man, revolted by his choice of wife. One asks “Where is your mom?” while the man professes he “has permission from [the girl's] parents”. Others yell: ”This is bullshit, this isn’t right” and “‘you’re a fucking sick pervert”.
Luckily for the people of New York and your sanity right now, the event was staged and orchestrated by YouTube user Coby Persin . As a much-needed comment on forced marriage and the ongoing number of child brides – 33,000 girls are forced to marry every day around the world – the YouTuber’s prank hit the public hard.

The Times Square child bride was a hoax. The man whose hand she held wasn’t her husband.
It was all part of a pretty elaborate demonstration of the truly sickening nature of child marriage. Because, as much as we’d like to offend anyone’s rights to wed a junior, in Western society it’s easy to forget that forced marriage is an existing issue. Everyone was (and is) astounded an elder would
wed a 12-year-old. But it’s happening all the time.

Girls not brides
Young women around the globe are still treated as brides, not girls. One third of girls in the developing world are married before the age of 18, according to the International Center for
Research on Women; over the next ten years, 150 million girls will be married before reaching that age.
We’re not living in the Marie Antoinette era (the princess was married aged 14 in 1770, when
pubescent girls would often be married off) yet young women are still being commodified for senior men’s gains. Child bride girls are often from less educated backgrounds, and girls who marry before 18 are more likely to experience domestic violence than girls who wed later. Even though it’s a routine part of certain, poor cultures – over half of the girls in Bangladesh, Mali, Mozambique and Niger are married before they hit 18-years-old – that doesn’t make it acceptable.

15-year-old Nasoin Akhter having her make up done before her wedding to a man aged 32, in Bangladesh.