Reply #7: Or it might have been intended as a protection: if the girl can't clearly

[struggle4progress]

consent, she can't be traded off as a "wife" in some backroom deal.

Certain disabilities can heighten the risk of sexual abuse in certain contexts.

I once worked in an institution where there was a physically attractive young woman in her twenties who was blind, deaf, and (either through disability or lack of appropriate early care) almost completely unable to communicate. It's not hard to imagine, that if someone offered to "marry" such a person, in a subsistence economy, some parents, having a number of other mouths to feed, might consider the offer on purely economic grounds.

The consensus of staff regarding another woman in the same institution was that she would have been functional enough to live independently, had she not been repeatedly been the victim of sexual predation in adolescence.

Someone once pointed out to me, that what was (in the past) a great civilizing step forward tends to become (in the future) a mere barbarism: slavery was the given example, with the claim that prior to the invention of slavery in the ancient world the victors in war often cannibalized the defeated.