It could be a neighbor, a classmate, or a colleague. A friend, an acquaintance, or a family member.
According to a report from the World Bank and Save the Children, 30,000 girls are married every day. That’s 20 girls per minute – or one girl every three seconds. According to Unicef, more than 700 million women in the world were married as children. They are deprived of their youth, denied education, become pregnant at a young age, and lose control of their own lives.
It may feel far away, or maybe you don’t think this happens in developed countries. But how would people react, in the middle of the day, in New York?
It happens continuously – all over the world. To highlight the problem and show that child marriages should not be ignored, Youtuber Coby Persin decided to conduct a social experiment.
What we are about to see is not a real, legal child marriage. It is important to watch, no matter how uncomfortable you may feel. We need to address this issue and raise awareness.
By simulating a fake marriage between a 12-year-old girl and a 65-year-old man, Coby Persin wanted to show how people would react.
The experiment took place right in Times Square in New York.
In the experiment, Coby played a photographer pretending to take photos of the 65-year-old man and his 12-year-old bride.
They posed and held each other’s hands. He smiled, looking at his new bride.
At first, people walked by and stared.
But the longer it went on, the angrier people’s reactions became.
Angry people approached the couple and confronted the man.
A woman asked, among other things, where the girl’s mother was and said she was too young.
Others stopped and said things like ‘this is insane,’ ‘this is not right,’ ‘this is not legal,’ and ‘you are a sick man.’
A woman decided to take matters into her own hands – and tried to pull the girl away from the man.
You could feel the atmosphere starting to change and the tension starting to build.
New York refused to accept that a little girl could marry an older man. Nobody should accept this, anywhere in the world!
