10 Year Old Yemeni Divorcee: Life is Worse

"There is no change at all since going on television. I hoped there was someone to help us, but we didn't find anyone to help us. It hasn't changed a thing. They said they were going to help me and no one has helped me. I wish I had never spoken to the media," Nujood says bitterly.

Nujood's parents say they've received nothing, and in the meantime Nujood stews wondering out loud how everything turned out this way.

"I was happy I got divorced but I'm sad about the way it turned out after I went on television," she said adding that she feels like an outcast even among her family and friends.

Nujood was pulled out of school in early 2008 and married off by her own parents to a man she says was old and ugly. And yet, as a wife, Nujood was spared nothing.

"I didn't want to sleep with him but he forced me to, he hit me, insulted me" said Nujood. She said being married and living as a wife at such a young age was sheer torture.

Nujood described how she was beaten and raped and how, after just a few weeks of marriage, she turned to her family to try to escape the arrangement. But her parents told her they could not protect her, that she belonged to her husband now and had to accept her fate.

Nujood's parents, like many others in Yemen, struck a social bargain. More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18, many times to older men, some with more than one wife.

It means the girls are no longer a financial or moral burden to their parents. But Nujood's parents say they did not expect Nujood's new husband to demand sex from his child bride.

To escape, Nujood hailed a taxi -- for the first time in her life -- to get across town to the central courthouse where she sat on a bench and demanded to see a judge.

Yemen is one of the least developed countries in the world, with a Human Development Index of 149 (out of 177 countries), and a poverty level of over 40 per cent. Only 35.9 per cent of the population has access to safe drinking water. For women, though, life is especially tough. A woman has only a one-in-three chance of being able to read and write (some 71 per cent of Yemeni women are illiterate, as opposed to 31 per cent of men; in most other Middle Eastern countries, the average female illiteracy rate stands at 35 per cent). If a Yemeni woman has a baby, she has only a one-in-five chance of being attended by a midwife, and she has a one-in-39 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth over her lifetime. As for rights, she has none - or very few. The law does not state what age a woman must be before she marries, which means that many females find themselves with a husband when they are as young as 12, something that has a serious impact on maternal mortality rates, and which can also result in other serious health problems, such as incontinence.