Even before the ceremony, it was clear the bride was reluctant.

``She has been crying all day, but the marriage will go ahead with or without her,'' Dana Cherendea, adviser to her father, said after the girl stormed out.

The adviser also said the bride would be punished - and suggested that meant a beating - for spoiling the lavish event.

The pertinent point here is not that the marriage was arranged, but that the bride is 12.

I don't know about you, but the father's adviser's remarks make me wonder whether beatings were also part of the "courtship". You're right, the 15-year-old groom is also not a free agent here. But no one has said that he's the one to blame, except the bride's little girlfriends, who are not in a position to challenge the people who are the real problem. He is just a proxy. If this is any indicator, he is in for a miserable few decades.

"Nobody asked her whether she wanted it," Dana Cherendea, an adviser to Florin Cioaba said. "It is part of a tradition for Gypsies, and the marriage shows that traditions are respected. It is not the one you want, it's the one you get."

Not entirely so, as Ana Maria’s cousin points out here:

``I don't want to marry, I am choosy and I have refused several marriage partners my parents presented to me.''
-- Gabriela Mihai, 17

If the marriage takes place regardless of whether the bride is present to give her consent or not, can you really say she has a choice? If a 12-year-old were to refuse under those conditions, what is her choice? To go home to the tender mercies of the father who would marry her off in absentia?

I suppose she could get a job and support herself. What kind of career can you suggest for a newly-liberated 12-year-old? I have a 12-year-old daughter. She's not ready to run a household, she's not ready for sex, and she's not ready to set out on her own in the world. The psychology of 12-year-old girls is not that different from culture to culture; only our expectations of them are different.

Her cousin may have the advantage of having parents who value her more as their child than as a piece of chattel in the brideprice market.

Maybe if the Rom fly a couple of airliners into the Sears Tower, we will think this is a not-good thing. That's what it took, after years of yelling by feminists, to get our leaders to notice that the Taliban were also doing not-good things to the girls and women in their households.

Sexual slavery is still slavery after all.