Dubai: Child marriages take place in many parts of the world, with some countries facing an even wider spread of the practice than in the Arab world.

Activists have urged governments around the world to introduce laws setting the minimum age for marriage at 18 for both boys and girls to prevent children being victimised.

In one case, an Afghan family gave their 3-year-old daughter to another family so she could marry their son when she was older. She was beaten and treated like a slave at the hands of the family. At the age of ten, she was raped by her future husband’s uncle. She suffered serious injuries and had to be hospitalised. She was eventually married off to a teenager in the family.

Later, she got divorced. Then at the age of 12, she was forced to marry her rapist, who continued to abuse her and would make her sleep in the stable with the animals. She managed to run away, and the police helped her find a shelter with a women’s organisation. Her “husband” was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison for rape.

In the absence of accurate statistics in Afghanistan, Unicef estimates that 46 per cent of girls are married off before the age of 18 and 15 per cent of them before the age of 15.

In Mauritania, a 11-year-old girl died after being force fed from the age of seven to make her look more marriageable, the report said.

That example was one of several ugly and inexcusable cases of child abuse and child marriages mentioned in a recently published report by Equality Now, a member of the Girls Not Brides (GNB) global advocacy group.

“Child marriage legitimises human rights violations and abuses of girls under the guise of culture, honour, tradition and religion,” wrote the report’s editor, Jacqui Hunt.

“Its far reaching effects go beyond the individual, affecting the entire community, and even national and global development. Ending child marriage must be a global priority”.

The report shed light on the laws and practices surrounding child marriage in 18 countries, including Chad, Eritrea, Guatemala, India, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Thailand and Yemen.

The report noted that the rate of child marriage is 66 per cent in Bangladesh and 6 per cent in the Central African Republic and Chad. In India, 47 per cent of girls are married before they turn 18, it added.