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One morning last month, Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali walked out of her husband's house here and ran to a local hospital, where she complained that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months. That alone would be surprising in Yemen, a deeply conservative Arab society where family disputes tend to be solved privately. What made it even more unusual was that Arwa was 9 years old.

The average age of marriage in Yemen's rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found. The country, at the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

Her father, Ali Muhammad al-Ahdal, said he had agreed to the marriage because two of Nujood's older sisters had been kidnapped and forcibly married, with one of them ending up in jail. Al-Ahdal said he had feared the same thing would happen to Nujood, and early marriage had seemed a better alternative.