Lawyers Manual - Unified Court System

382 Dorchen A. Leidholdt
17. See International Matchmaking Organizations: A Report to Congress
(1999); Asjlyn Loder, Mail Order Brides Find US Land of Milk, Battery,
Women’s E-News, July 13, 2003.
18. Albany, New York, Nov. 6, 2003. Contact information for the New York
State Coalition Against Domestic Violence can be obtained on its website,
http://www.nyscadv.org.
19. BBC News, Child Marriage Violates Rights, March 7, 2001, citing UNICEF
statistics that “half of all girls in some countries are married by the age of
18. . . . Child marriages are most common in sub-Saharan Africa and South
Asia, where poverty, traditional taboos about premarital sex, and fears of AIDS
are widespread. . . . In Nepal, 7% of girls are married before they are 10, and
40% by age 15.” Chicago Tribune, Child Marriage’s “Brutal” Effects on Girls
Worldwide, “Child Marriage. . . affects about 51 million girls in developing
countries worldwide,” December 14, 2004, http://www.kaisernetwork.org.
20. Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,
“Honor killing is one of history’s oldest gender-based crimes. It assumes
that a woman’s behavior casts a reflection on the family and the community.
If women fall in love, seek a divorce even from a battering husband, or
enter into a relationship outside marriage, they are seen as violating the
honor of the community,” April 10, 2000.
21. Mark Rice-Oxley, “The United Nations says at least 5,000 women worldwide
are killed each year as a matter of so-called family honor”; Britain
Examines Honor Killings, The Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2004.
22. Genital Mutilation On the Increase in Europe, Press Association News,
November 26, 2004; Europe Impotent in Fighting Female Mutilation
Among African Women, November 30, 2004, http://www.Afrol.com.
23. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, I Will Never Forget the Day of My
Circumcision, The Sciences, March/April 1998, at 23-27.
24. In the United Kingdom, it has been estimated that between three and four
thousand girls undergo the procedure each year, although there have been
no prosecutions under the federal statute banning FGM, which was
enacted in 1985. In France, there have been a number of well-publicized
prosecutions of West African immigrant parents who have arranged to have
their daughters cut.
25. Penal Code § 135.85.
26. 18 USCA § 116.