Child brides are now being advertised on Facebook in Becheve community of Obanliku, Cross River State, Daily Beast has reported.
Obanliku, a local government in Cross River, is an eight hours drive from Calabar, the State Capital.
Becheve community is made up of 17 villages which practice an age long tradition where young girls are given out in what is called ‘money marriage’ – an exchange of female child as wife for food items, money or debt settlement.
The girls, who are then referred to as ‘money women’ or ‘money wives’, are often advertised on Facebook and sometimes sold to far older men to be their grandfathers.
Once a girl is sold out for money marriage, she is considered dead by her immediate family and warned never to return irrespective of how she is treated by her husband or his relatives.
A girl simply named Monica told Daily Beast that her father “knew nothing about Facebook until my elder brother bought him a smartphone and convinced him to join Facebook and post our photographs whenever he likes.”
Monica, who ran away from her husband to live with a friend less than a year after she got married, said her father would buy her and her sisters new clothes and force them to wear the clothes so he could take photographs of them.
A local chief in Ogbakoko, Magnus Ejikang, was quoted as saying that the practice “is meant to boost the status of the men in Becheve community” such that “the more brides you have, the more respect you gain in the community.”
