To wonder how this is legal and what can be done to prevent it

[Fawnly]

Over the last few weeks I’ve heard 3 separate stories of young British girls, moving to the Middle East, getting married, changing religion and having children with men who are older.
One was on here and it seems it ended in abuse.

One of the others has really disturbed me, this girl started a relationship with a doctor from Qatar who was late 20s when she was 17!! As soon as she turned 18 she started getting the documents needed to move. 6 weeks after turning 18 she has moved to Qatar, married just weeks after that (had to change religion first). Then almost immediately conceived a child. Her parents (who are my friends), haven’t been able to visit as she refuses to let them. She now has 2 children, totally distant from her family etc.

Another was similar but the UAE.

AIBU to wonder how this is legal? Why are these countries letting 30 year old men marry teenagers who they have just moved 4000 miles from home!

I have teenagers and I’m beside myself at the thought of this happening to them!

How and why does this happen? How can it be prevented?

She's an adult and she's made a (probably stupid) choice. At some point we have to let people make their own decisions.

Bring you own children up to be rlas ready as possible for adulthood. That's all you can do.

I so completely agree with this!

The Relationships board would become completely defunct if we did this.

Tbh, young men get very bad press in this country. And rightly so in many cases. So much of our culture reduces women to sexual playthings for men (representation of women on SM, in films, general attitudes).

I can actually see how a young woman, who likely has already had negative experiences of being a woman in the UK by 17, would be seduced by the idea of a man from a culture which, on the surface, doesn't appear to treat women like that. Especially a slightly older man who is an educated professional.

Just look at what a good lifestyle and a nice house can do in terms of keeping women in crap (not abusive) relationships in this country (according to threads I've read on MN) and if he's good looking too, well!

The rise in the 'trad wife' movement is driven (in my opinion) by young women who, having seen their mothers struggling to 'have it all' but instead just end up 'doing it all' and are drawn more towards a model where they can home make and raise childen whilst the man provides.

The realities and pitfalls of that dynamic are obvious to anyone with a bit of life experience but 17/18 year olds are always lacking in that.

If as a society we decide we don't want this for our daughters, we need to get our own house in order before we start criticising that of others.

Given that women are generally treated as second class citizens in these cultures and they think nothing of beheading criminals I doubt they give much of a thought to older men marrying teens. I believe they are allowed up to 4 wives.

Her family were practicing Christians, she went to a Christian School as a weekly boarder.

I wonder what she learnt about adulthood, relationships and family life at a Christian boarding school? What her expectations of adulthood and marriage were? Maybe these were better met (in her eyes) by someone outside of her own religion because, let's face it, there aren't many young men her age who will have a similar Christian ethos here.

That sort of shock and horror can result in community ostracism followed by honour killing in some cultures.
Not unknown in the UK, when a girl from a tight community is meeting up with a man not of her faith.
Not so funny then.

Oh dear god
Talk about making a drama out of someone else's business

I can hear your pearls crunching together all the way from Portugal.

Too slow. Call the Pope himself!

And of course wealth and privilege brings children such untold happiness that they never leave their homes or become independent!! Or marry non wealthy foreigners of other races and religions. What's the world come to [ clutch pearls, faint]

The thing is this is actually a very unusual story. I know many people here would love to believe that older arab men are leering after their pure white daughters but it simply isn't the case. White women aren't seen as a socially admirable marriage in gulf countries. A doctor who is actually from Qatar- his family would more likely be very disappointed in this match than anything.
Yet OP has framed it as though it's part of an endemic problem..
What is a known endemic problem, is middle aged English men travelling to south east Asia for sex tourism, and marrying very young SEA women. Curiously, despite this being raised a few times in the thread, it seems not to have affected OP in at all the same way.

You can’t legislate against poor decision making.

It's a trend on Tiktok, I married a Dubai Prince look at my life. It's very tempting if you are a young girl. I'm not young and I get them approaching me on FB and even LI. They get the cachet of a white woman and they get the rich husband and lifestyle.

There is no "cachet" (whatever that means). It's looked down on socially, unless the woman is rich or famous.

Her family were practicing Christians, she went to a Christian School as a weekly boarder.

It’s odd, her parents claim they are very close to his family and she has other friends who are in similar situations.

He had been living in the uk since he was a student.

Again so much drip feeding by OP. It derails any sensible discussion.

I cannot stress enough that men doing this online are either scammers or sketchy. There is considerable social (and government!) pressure in the Gulf to marry other Gulf Arabs from an equivalent social background. Marrying a 18 year old foreigner offers very little benefit socially or economically, which leaves genuine love marriages and creepy weirdos.

My cousin (Lebanese, dentist) met and married her husband (Emirati, doctor) when they were both established professionals in their 30s and while everyone is all happy families now, his parents’ initial reaction was pretty much “why are you doing this to us?” If she’d been an 18 year old Brit fresh out of boarding school, I think they’d have hit the roof.

I am Hindu by origin and was born in a majority Muslim country (Malaysia). I find these threads really quite othering TBH. I would not see orthodox Muslims as any less or more misogynistic than very orthodox Christians. As is the case in western society, some Muslims are very observant and some not. Marriage has a greater focus and family life is more central to culture. In the UK this is less so. It does not however make this position wrong. On this thread I see lots of they this and they that. Some of the comments are really poorly informed. I would be concerned if my 17 year old DD was in a relationship with a much older man TBH, but that would not be centred around his faith, it would be because my daughter needs to grow and develop and have fun. The same happens in many white Christian families. The issue here is you find different faiths- particularly Islam very scary and increasingly there is push to demonise anyone from this faith.

If their god says it's ok, for them it is.

I wonder how easy it is for them to leave and return to their home country if they change their minds. 🤔

That's different in their eyes - an underage Muslim girl of Pakistani heritage (without any eligibility for nationality) is described as 'knowing exactly what she was doing' compared to an adult woman from a wealthy white Christian family who apparently can't possibly be capable of knowing what she wants or have any awareness of the consequences.

@MangoBathSalts

A slight increase in the average age at first marriage to 27.4 years for Qatari males and to 24.9 years for Qatari females, compared to an increase for non-Qatari males to 30.3 years and non-Qatari females to 27.9 years.

I've also seen a lot of facebook reels about this sort of thing. Once you click on one you get a lot of similar ones suggested. It's not just Arab men though, I've seen quite a few young American women presenting their lives on these reels. They are often in the form of "my 9 to 5 while my husband is at work" type thing. You'll see them doing their facial care and make up routine; cleaning their home, making the bed, going out to the gym with a Stanley cup, coming back and making some kind of super-healthy lunch (I don't know what most of the ingredients are), then relaxing with TV or reading a magazine and then starting to prepare the evening meal.
Sometimes they have children and then you'll see "My 9 to 3 while the children are at school", all time-stamped and captioned.
It looks like a very nice life. They live in beautiful homes. Everything seems perfect. They have time to go to the gym, they are always immaculately presented and have great beauty routines.
I can see that being attractive to 18 year olds. I'm not knocking SAHM parents or childfree women who don't need to work. Everyone can choose what they want to do with their life. But it's a possible explanation why a young person might choose to take up the opportunity of marrying a doctor from Qatar who has promised her a lifestyle like this rather than going to university and studying for her own career.
Because of the social media algorithms, once you start looking at things like that you will be shown more and more of the same thing until it appears like everyone is living that kind of lifestyle.

It's not so long ago that it was common for christian white girls in this country to get married at 13/4 years.
Generally to older men. Life wasn't Jane Austen, rather Dickens and Shelley

Why can't she visit?

Who are you to interfere in other people's lives OP?

But this happens in the UK too. Girls in their late teens marry much older men - it's pretty universal actually. I know plenty of women who are married to men who are older. Two of my aunts, my mum etc.

I'm not saying its right for a 17 year old to marry a 35 year old, however I do question why this is framed as a problem about middle eastern men.

What are you trying to get at here, OP?