Crime or Culture?

For my PLN response, I responded to an article posted by CNN about a 12 year old Yemeni girl who died in a painful childbirth. In Yemen and a lot of other Middle Eastern Countries girls are forced to marry very young and at the same time girls are always thought of less than guys and not appreciated, it has been like this for thousands of years but giving up your only child and forcing her to marry a 24 year old man. I mean there should be a limit at some point. And some girls are even younger, for instance, there is another story in this article about a 10 year old girl named Nujood Ali who was taken out of school and forced to marry a man who beat and raped her within weeks of their ceremony. These stories really made me think why people would allow this to happen or why parents would do this to their kids. But what we need to understand is that this is part of the Yemen culture and it has been ever since it was created. We can't just go in and tell them to stop. That's like the Yemen people coming over to the United States and telling us to stop being Christian or saying that we need to stop giving girls rights. Also when we look at them we think they are horrible people with no respect towards women, cruel and unusual methods, and bad living conditions. But what do they think when they look at the United States? When the Yemeni's look over here they probably think that our culture is all about crime, drug use, pre-marital sex, unfair laws, ect. We all know that it isn't completely like that. I mean we have problems but everyone does! One of our problem's is that whenever we hear about this kind of stuff, we just jump right to conclusion and "know" that is isn't right at all. Whenever a story like this gets on the news, we always make it sound bad but that is because they never explain the story behind it or about this other Countries culture. America is always quick to judge and we always will be. But that is just the way Americans have learned to act through thousands of years of fighting with other Countries and seeing there problems. We don't intentionally act like this it's just a natural response. Even with these problems though I say that we don't try to get involved because the only way we will be able to change anything is threw force and violence which there is already to much of in the world. I mean sure I think that it is wrong that people would do this but we have enough to worry about already just in the U.S. One last thing that we need to realize is that Europe and even western America used to do the exact same thing with forcing girls to marry at a very young age. So next time anyone see's something like this on the News or Internet or anywhere just stop and think, is it crime? Or is it culture?