The UK must ban child marriage or it will undermine its commitment to ending violence against women and girls

The UK must ban child marriage or it will undermine its commitment to ending violence against women and girls

By Vareen Ismail   At the age of 16, Payzee Mahmod should have been like other teenagers in London: studying for her exams, and deciding if she wanted to go on to university. Instead, her conservative, Kurdish Muslim family married her off to a man who was “so old he was losing his hair”.   On the wedding night, she was trapped in a hotel room with her husband, a stranger nearly twice her age who started to make violent sexual advances. She locked herself in the bathroom, called her…