Eye-Opening Social Experiment Sheds Spotlight On Horrors Of Child Marriage

YouTube prankster Coby Persin is serious about raising awareness of child marriage.

So he set up a faux union between a 65-year-old man and 12-year-old girl in the most public of places, New York City's Times Square, to see how people would react.

Posing as a photographer, Persin clicks away at the "newlyweds," generating outrage and attempts at intervention from bystanders. One woman offers to take the girl to the police, while a man simply says, "You know this isn't right, right?"

Child marriage remains a global problem. According to the International Center for Research on Women, one in nine girls in the developing world is married before the age of 15. And it's estimated that if current trends do not change, over the next decade, 150 million girls will be married prior to turning 18.

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