Divorced at Age 10: Nujood Ali's Stolen Childhood

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote last week, and Glamour magazine wrote last year, Nujood was married off by her parents to a man three times her age, who vowed to wait for sex until Nujood had had her first period, but instead raped her on their wedding night. Using her bread money to hire a taxi to take her to the local courthouse one day, Nujood was lucky enough to run into a lawyer who agreed to represent her for free. "I hate the night," she told the lawyer.

Nujood's memoir, "I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced," a best-seller in France, was just published in this country.

Besides making my stomach flip, Nujood's story also made me think about how childhood is stolen or simply lost, not just in Yemen, but in many cultures, including our own. We love to say in the United States, as we have for generations, that children grow up too fast these days -- and it's true, given that 7.1 percent of kids are having sex before age 13.

Besides their constant exposure to sex, there's pressure to build a resume early on in order to get into a good school, which requires excelling at all things while also developing a passion for baseball or quantum physics or gardening and then being able to talk about it coherently. (If not to try to get a leg up for their babies, why else are those "educational" videos that my colleague Ria Misra recently wrote about so popular among parents?) Then there are the legions of children suffering from adult diseases such as Type II diabetes.

Growing up in America is now defined by a continuum, where age is blurred and there's no clearly defined period when children inhabit a world and culture separated from adults.

And at the other end of the continuum, adults these days don't ever fully seem to grow up. Perhaps it's because we try to compensate for being on the fast-track as kids by searching for that lost childhood. A couple of generations ago, people graduated from high school or college, got married, and set up housekeeping on their own. But now it's not uncommon for overgrown kids to move back in with their parents at age 26. Or there's my case, where a few years back I went to visit my mom and dad with my new baby and, as it got later, wondered when my mom was going to put the baby to bed. Suddenly I remembered, Oh, I'm the mom! Just to make it clear, I engaged in that magical thinking in my 40s, when I had been an adult, at least chronologically, for 20 years.

The stories I've been hearing lately of parents partying with their college-age kids down at the fraternity house or the fact that my 4-year-old daughter and I dress much the same in leggings and boots are other examples of the same phenomenon.

Children and adults in other countries are mushed together, too, but for different reasons. Nujood wasn't married off because her parents thought it was a great idea; they needed the dowry--roughly $750 to feed their large family. They also considered the frequency of rape and kidnapping of young girls in Yemen, including another of their daughters, and thought a husband would keep Nujood safe.

It's hard for me to imagine my most adult-like friends acting more bravely than Nujood. But this little girl paid a heavy price: Nujood got her divorce, but she still lost her youth.