Permission to wed your 13-year-old daughter

Danish not-for-profit organisation BØRNEfonden is pushing parents into uncomfortable territory in a new campaign that asks fathers how they would feel if a 30-year-old man asked to marry their 13-year-old daughters. The campaign has been launched in a bid to draw attention to the continued plight of young girls in Mali, who are often forced into marriages with much older men.

The spot is skin-crawlingly creepy, with the 30-year-old man nonchalantly asking the parents for a chat with their daughter. From there, something more nefarious is quickly revealed and the man asks to marry the child in the near future.  

The point being made is that if it was your daughter, you definitely wouldn’t be okay with it.

To make the spot, BØRNEfonden collaborated with the mothers and daughters, but left the fathers in the dark. 

“Prior to the shoot, we found the girls through a casting agency. In that way, we could let Alexander rehearse with the girls and practice all scenarios that could occur, depending on their fathers’ reactions,” Robert/Boisen art director Niklas Hultquist told Adweek.

The campaign comes as part of the organisation’s annual push to encourage Danes to sponsor children living in some of the most deprived communities across the world.