Child Marriage: When No Law Prevents It

Seven years of waiting for the approval of the Child Rights Protection Bill has been fruitless. While women's activists and child rights advocates were hopeful about a provision in this bill that set the marriage age at 18 and imposed penalties on parents who forced their children to marry before this age, the bill was passed by the parliament with the complete removal of these provisions. However, the implementation of this bill still awaits the Guardian Council's opinion. It seems that female representatives in the tenth parliament are once again trying to find a way to prohibit child marriages under the age of 13. According to Fatemeh Zolghadr, a member of the Women's Faction of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, the 'Child Marriage' plan, which proposes to raise the marriage age for girls and boys and prohibit marriages under 13, will be on the agenda of representatives after a one-week break of the parliament. Under this plan, which has been prepared by the Women's Faction, the marriage age for boys is set at 18 and for girls at 16, with marriages between 13 and 15 only permissible under conditions such as parental consent and court approval. Zolghadr emphasized that currently, marriages can occur from the age of 9 in the country, and female representatives are working to stop this practice. However, Sodeh Rad, a gender equality activist residing in France, views these efforts as a futile endeavor, arguing that Iran must first join and implement international conventions. Members of the sixth parliament managed to change the legal age of maturity for girls from 9 to 13 after facing numerous challenges. According to the law, marriages below the legal age must only occur with parental consent or a court ruling. However, as social researchers indicate, many marriages under 13 are not registered due to families circumventing the law, relying instead on a written agreement behind the Quran or a handwritten document to guarantee their children's marriages. Hassan Qazian, a sociologist living in the U.S., states that people have learned to evade the law and follow certain traditions. He also points to poverty and the lack of basic educational facilities as reasons for child marriages. However, the proposal to prohibit marriages under 13 has not yet been placed on the parliament's agenda, and opponents of raising the marriage age are voicing their objections from official platforms. Kobari Khazaeli, a member of the Cultural and Social Council of Women of the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, stated, 'Islam does not allow us to raise the marriage age above 18; even in the world, we see people marrying at the age of 15. The age of work starts at 11, and the age of delinquency begins at 8; in this case, how can we consider the marriage age above 18?' Kamil Ahmadi, an anthropologist residing in Iran who has researched child marriages, considers the mere act of marrying young girls as violence against them, stating that once children enter into marriage contracts, they are regarded as adults and bear the responsibilities of family work, farm work, and similar duties, whether male or female. This is particularly burdensome for girls due to their more fragile and weaker bodies. There are significant sexual pressures, especially on young girls during sexual intercourse, which occurs without a proper understanding of sexual relationships or sexual education before marriage, leading to considerable psychological and physical harm to these children. In this round of efforts to change the laws, where there have been failures to amend them and attempts to change them again, where do Iranian women stand? How far can women's activists insist on their unchanging demands? Hossein Qazian states that the mere fact that women's activists have managed to bring these demands to the stage of legal discussion is an enviable position.