Sociologist Kjetil Rolness has criticised Dagsrevyen following a report about a 14-year-old girl who was married off in Gaza.
According to him, Norway’s state broadcaster NRK failed to mention that child marriage constitutes abuse, and that the practice was widespread long before the war.
The report was broadcast on Dagsrevyen on Saturday. Viewers saw smiling people in festive attire singing and dancing. Standing in the middle of the celebrations was Sahed (14), dressed in white.
“The moment has now arrived: Sahed (14) is bidding a final farewell to her childhood and is being married off to a relative she barely knows,” said NRK’s Middle East correspondent Åse Marit Befring in the report.
The groom was 18 years old. The two had met for the first time two months earlier. The bride’s father explained that money was tight and that the family of nine needed three meals a day.
NRK then linked the wedding to the war. Because more people are struggling to survive, there has also been an increase in child brides, it was reported. The report concluded with Sahed, who is now 15, saying that she was happy in her marriage.
In an article on Substack, Rolness describes the report as a complete collapse of journalistic and press ethics.
“NRK fails even once, throughout a lengthy report, to state that child marriage is in itself a form of abuse,” he writes.
Rolness believes that NRK instead blamed Israel. Child marriage was, in fact, common in Gaza long before the war.
This is confirmed by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). In 2009, over 28 per cent of girls who married in Gaza were under the age of 18. In 2022, the proportion was 17.9 per cent.
The situation in the West Bank has been quite different. There, the Palestinian Authority set the minimum age at 18 in 2019, and the proportion of child marriages has since fallen to around five per cent.
In Hamas-controlled Gaza, the minimum age for girls is 17. However, the Sharia court in Gaza can grant exemptions for girls as young as 14 years and seven months.
And Gaza’s highest Sharia court reports that over 20 per cent of marriages in the past year involved girls under the age of 18. In 2024, over 600 girls under the age of 15 were married off.
NRK made no mention whatsoever of culture or religion. Rolness, however, does. He refers to a 2019 survey of 406 women in Gaza who were married off before they turned 18. The survey cited ‘religious beliefs and conservative family norms’ as the cause.
Rolness also reminds us that the Prophet Muhammad married Aisha when she was six years old, and consummated the marriage when she was nine.
The images in the report were sourced by NRK’s local team in Gaza, brothers Ahmed and Gabriel Abu Kmail. Foreign journalists are still not allowed into Gaza.
One of these brothers celebrated Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israel in 2021, but NRK has said that they can live with that.
