After reading a study released by Justice for Iran on child marriages and some of the moving testimonials of girls/women who have been victims of this practice, I couldn’t stop thinking of the horror of it all — in Iran’s case it’s nothing less than state-sanctioned paedophilia. While the monied elites of Tehran, Mumbai, Doha, Niamey . . . you name it . . . live their pampered lives in gilded gated enclaves of civility, seemingly oblivious to the harsher realities surrounding them, others, not-so-fortunate, the disenfranchised and the poor are condemned to lives of exponential misery. That children in these societies should have their childhood innocence bloodied by this barbarism is almost too much to bear.