One girl under 15 married every seven seconds worldwide, by Hugh Tomlinson.

When Sahar was 13, soon after her family arrived in Lebanon after fleeing the conflict in Syria, she was married off to a 20-year-old man as her parents tried to cut costs. It was not the wedding she had dreamt of.

“The wedding day I was imagining would be a great day but it wasn’t. It was full of sadness,” she said.

A year later she is two months pregnant. “I feel really blessed that I am having a baby,” she said. “But I am a child raising a child.”

Sahar — not her real name — is one of 700 million child brides on the planet, according to a report [by Save The Children], with 15 million girls married before the age of 18 each year, a rate of one every two seconds. . …

South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Central America are broadly the worst affected regions, with tens of millions of girls condemned to lives of sexual slavery.

hat-tip Stephen Neil