centre’s activists, supported by a lawyer, started legal proceedings that would be an example to many other girls in the same conditions.
Nujood Ali went against her own family, who made her marry to obtain a modest dowry from her betrothed, and at the same time get rid of a mouth to feed at home.
The lawyer Chadha Nasser, who defended Nujood Ali free of charge, accused her husband of having broken the law by raping the little girl, and her father of having lied about his daughter’s age.
During the debate Nujood Ali refused the judge’s proposal to return to her husband after an interval of five years. She couldn’t stand that man, or his family, any more.
Nujood Ali got a divorce. It was the 15 April 2008. Her story is told in a book entitled “I am Nujood, age 10 and divorced” written by Nujood and the journalist Delphine Minoui.4
The book, distributed with huge success and translated into 17 languages, was made into a film by the director Khadija Al Salami, a victim herself – a former child bride – of an identical fate and a similar escape from a tyrant husband.
Nujood Ali’s story is personal and intensely narrated against the background of a rural environment in Yemen, similar to many other developing countries where the rights of girls and women are not recognised; where it seems that nobody pays any attention to the pain a little girl feels when, deprived of her childhood, her dreams, her plans for a happy life, she finds herself a prisoner of a man, in a house, a place, that all darken her very existence.
The book and the film on Nujood Ali are at the same time a warning and a journey of hope towards a better, freer, more humane and just society, without abuse and bullying at the expense of the weakest. A society open to total change to achieve the dream of many little girls: a society where everyone has rights. A society freed of poverty and the need to sell its own children.
Khadija, also a child bride, before she became a successful film director
Khadija Al-Salami, was born in 1966 in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen. At 11 years old she was forced to marry a man of thirty, but did not accept what she experienced as an abuse; and it was, despite her tribe and her family considering marriages between little girls and adults of even thirty or forty years older, legitimate and normal.
The child refused to have sex with her husband and he returned her to her family, as if she were damaged goods.
One day Khadija plucked up all her courage and decided to be the protagonist of her own life, to get divorced and choose to make herself a better person, possibly a happy one.
She ran away from her husband, went to an association for the protection of women, which helped her find work at a local TV station. It was the start of her recovery, her entrance into a work environment that she liked very much and that was to mark the course of her studies, her work and her success as a director.
A providential scholarship, won at 16, helped her achieve her objectives. She went to study in the United States and graduated with top marks in Film Production and Directing.
Then she went to live in France, where she began her career as a documentary filmmaker. She has made dozens of films on the role of Yemeni women and girls.
There have been many rewards in recognition of her commitment in defence of child brides. She was nominated as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by Frédérick Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication at that time. She has received accolades from many institutions including the Foreign Legion.
Her film "I am Nujood, age 10 and divorced" won an award at the International Film Festival in Dubai in 2014.
Khadija Al-Salami, is the first female Yemeni film director and stands for the commitment and courage of the women of her country. She is an example for all the girls who do not wish to submit to cruel, old fashioned, rural customs which out of ignorance trample their basic rights to live in freedom without being abused.
Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Prize girl
Malala is convinced that girls are entitled to an education. She was ten years old when the Swat valley, the District of Pakistan where she lived, was attacked by the Taliban that abolished the right to study with the closure of many schools, including her own.
Malala described life under Taliban rule in a BBC blog using the pseudonym Gul Makai. It was 1999. The girl began several collaborations with major newspapers, including the "New York Times", where she expressed her disagreement with Taliban rule, opposed to education for all Pakistani citizens, especially women.
She on the contrary loudly affirmed during interviews: "I want to go to school, I want to play, listen to music, sing!".
In 2012, she became a Taliban target.
"Which one of you is Malala Yousafzai?” was the question she heard, but didn’t have time to answer before two gun shots hit her head. Two armed men had boarded the school bus that was taking her home, with the intention of killing her for having written in her Urdu blog that women have a right to education.
Malala’s topics were considered obscene by the terrorists who claimed responsibility for the attack with these phrases: "This is a new chapter of obscenity which we must put an end to… she has become a symbol of western culture in the area, which she has openly touted… she considers Obama her ideal leader. Let this be a lesson to her".5
In the telephone claim to responsibility for the attack, Ehsanulla, the Taliban spokesman, threatened a new ambush if Malala survived.
Malala indeed hovered between life and death, but she managed to survive. She was transferred to a hospital in Great Britain and recovered. She then decided to remain in the U.K. with her family, to continue her studies and devote herself to her campaign for girls education.
She's tough. She was brought up with a good education at home. Her father Ziauddin, a poet, and a teacher at the Khushal Public School, is of a progressive and emancipated mentality. He has always taught her the value of education ever since she was little and has shown a desire, on several occasions, to see his daughter go into politics one day.
The confidence Malala’s father had in his daughter’s talent encouraged the girl to engage in social activities which she divulged through blogs and the net. So she began to receive awards and new assignments.
She won the National Youth Peace Prize, conferred on her by the Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and was subsequently nominated for the International Children Peace Prize.
On 12 July 2013, on the occasion of her 16th birthday, she wore a shawl that had once belonged to Benazir Bhutto, to speak at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York and made an appeal for the right of every boy and every girl to education.
In November 2013 Malala was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
President Martin Schulz defined her as 'a global icon of the fight for girls’ education".
Moved, Malala said: "I hope that through our unity and our determination we can achieve our goals and help the 57 million children
