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Among the many vexing problems with which the world continues to grapple is the issue of child marriage, a matter that predominantly affects girls in less developed countries. As the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) notes, 20 percent of girls worldwide are married before reaching the age of 18, and in some parts of the globe the rate is twice as high: Unfortunately, social media platforms are full of inaccurate postings on the subject from persons who are not seeking to raise awareness of the child marriage issue, but simply to demonize other religions and cultures. The following is one such example of this phenomenon: To all you misguided, uninformed liberal ‘women’ demonstrating in favor of embracing Islam, this young lady is being sold into sexual slavery as a child bride. She is a Christian. She watched her father beheaded and her mother raped. Where is her safe place? the meme asks. However, the blonde girl pictured here was not being sold into sexual slavery as a child bride by Muslims (or anyone else), and no credible reports (outside of the inflammatory meme itself) suggested she was a Christian who had seen her father beheaded and her mother raped. The image used in the meme originated with a (no longer available) video from 2013 that captured a 7-year-old girl participating in a Quran recital competition, as noted in a Morocco World News article: The referenced Arabic Canada website (now defunct) wrote of this picture as follows (roughly translated from Arabic): Other screenshots from the video captured the girl looking considerably less distraught: This isn't to say that child marriage isn't a real problem, or that it and other depredations — such as beheadings and rape — haven't been perpetrated by those associated with ISIS, but the image used in this meme isn't representative of any of those issues.
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