Philobiblon

Two truly depressing articles:

In Ethopia, girls face being kidnapped and forced into marriage with much older, and very likely HIV-positive, men.

In February, her parents received a letter from another suitor asking to marry Mulu but she refused so the 39-year-old man turned up at the house and kidnapped her with her parents’ consent. “I managed to get my parents to agree for us to be tested for HIV because I had heard about it at school and on the radio. I was negative but my abductor was positive.” Mulu’s parents agreed that she did not have to marry the man.

The one bit of hope in that is the obvious positive effect of education in giving girls and women – at least the really tough, smart ones – tools to protect themselves. (And when you read the story Mulu has to be very tough indeed.)

In Turkey, girls are meanwhile being effectively emotionally blackmailed into committing suicide (and no doubt sometimes straight-out murdered with suicide as a cover for the killers):

Turkey’s southeastern Anatolia … has become notorious in recent years for the high number of suicides, particularly of girls and young women whose despair is said to stem from their severely restricted lives. But women’s groups and human-rights workers believe a more sinister explanation lies behind many of the deaths. They’re convinced a growing number of girls and women are being locked in rooms by their families, with a gun, poison or a noose, and left there until they kill themselves.