Man tries to sell off teenaged daughter
By Qurban Ali Khushik
DADU: The height of poverty in rural areas, especially after this season’s rains and last year’s flood, has reached to an extent where peasants are not hesitating in selling their young daughters into marriage to middle-aged men.
A girl in her early teens was to be wedded to a man of 50 years when she managed to reach a police station. Police produced the girl before a local court for recording her statement.
Mohammad Urs of Saleh Lakhiar village in Mehar taluka arranged the marriage of her adolescence daughter Mussarat with a man of the same village, but some 36 or 37 years senior to her.
The girl getting the wind of odd-coupling slipped out of her home to reach the new bus stand in Dadu town. However, a crowd gathered when she lost her wits and began weeping. People on coming to know the girl’s ordeal took her to the B-section police station. She told police that her father had sold her into marriage with a man in fifties. She sought police protection.
Police took the girl to a local court which asked them to stop her from getting married.
ASP Dadu city, Tariq Aziz Sindhu told Dawn that the girl had expressed fears of losing her life in the name of honour.
Later, police gave the custody of girl to her father but only after getting his statement recorded at the police station that she won’t be forced into marriage.
Mohammad Urs said that poverty forced him to sell his daughter into marriage for Rs50,000 as he was unable to feed the family. This year’s rains added to crops already damaged by the floods of 2010, subsequently leaving them at naught.
Source: Dawn
Date:10/15/2011
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