The New York Times Magazine has a wrenching photo-essay on the incidence and universality of “child brides”. Girls are forced unwillingly into marriage with, and frequently sold to, husbands rapists often generations older than themselves - either to avoid the cost of raising a “useless female”, to raise money, or to cancel family debts. The practice is almost inescapable:

Globally, the number of child brides is hard to tabulate; they live mostly in places where births, deaths and the human milestones in between go unrecorded. But there are estimates. About 1 in 7 girls in the developing world (excluding China) gets married before her 15th birthday, according to analyses done by the Population Council, an international research group. In the huge Indian states of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the proportion is 36 percent; in Bangladesh, 37 percent; in northwest Nigeria, 48 percent; in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, 50 percent.

But that’s not the worst of it.

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