OUR WORK
EARLY MARRIAGEFighting against the forced marriage of young girls
Still a challenge today
This story has never ceased to haunt Khadija Al Salami, the founder of My Future Yemen, as it is her story too. She has turned it into a film and has promised to devote her life to fighting against this scourge for young girls.
To be married off at the age of 10 is, unfortunately, the fate of very many young girls in Yemen. Parents, who are extremely poor and lacking in education, thus hope to ensure a material future for their daughters, without realising the irreversible physical and psychological damage they are causing them.
My Future Yemen has defined the fight against the early marriage of girls as one of its primary goals. You too can help us.
Extract from the film: “I am Nojoom, Age 10 and Divorced” >
A concert to pay tribute
Invited a few years ago to the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) with her film “I am Nojoom, Age 10 and Divorced”, Khadija Al Salami, together with the cause she defended, particularly moved the audience.
One of the spectators that day, Mr Maurice Simon, Deputy Mayor of the neighbouring commune of Gaillard, decided to compose a song to support Mrs Al Salami’s fight against early marriage. A song that was also to involve a songwriter, Cécilem, and an entire orchestra.
In his own words:
I wrote this song in June 2016. I saw Khadija AL SALAMI’s film “I am Nojoom, Age 10 and Divorced” at the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) and was deeply moved by the subject: the forced marriage of young girls. Over and beyond the ascetic aesthetics of the images and the perfect philosophical, historical and legal mastery with which Khadija tackled such a sensitive subject, never giving into a simplistic approach, it was the great distress of these young girls forced to endure the torments of utterly inhuman practices that held all my attention.
As a humanist and a human rights activist, I considered this “commodification” of human beings, and, in particular, of very young and thus very vulnerable girls, to be a crime against the human conscience. I thus decided to compose a text that my friend Cécilem (songwriter and artist) could set to music and perform in order to help fight this despicable practice.
Cécilem, a committed artist, agreed to join me in denouncing this practice. The result is this song.
I have thus dedicated my song to Khadija AL SALAMI, the film director, but also to all those young girls forced into marriage throughout the world. Unable to know and name them all, for me they all bear the same name, “Khadija”, to unite them in their distress and oblige us to react and cease to be guilty by our failure to take action .”
Maurice Simon