Murders of Young Brides in Early Marriages

Have you looked at the crime section of newspapers in Iran these days? Perhaps the news of murders has not attracted your interest, and you have skipped over it. However, if reading these pages is interesting to you, you may have come across reports of the murders of Iranian women aged 17 to 20 that have been published in recent months. These reports sometimes get lost among important political and economic news. Let's review these reports together: 19-year-old Faiza from Gorgan was murdered 45 days ago at the Tablou intersection in Gorgan in front of passersby by her husband with multiple knife wounds, and the suspect was arrested at the scene. Faiza's family told the authorities that four years ago, when Pouria proposed to Faiza, they did not agree to their marriage because he was doing very well academically. However, Pouria insisted, and Faiza agreed, leading to their marriage. Thus, a marriage that began when Faiza was fifteen years old ended with her murder at nineteen. Sociologist Saeed Peyvandi, residing in Paris, is with us. Mr. Peyvandi, it has been previously stated that more than thirty percent of murders in Iran are familial. Given this news, can a relationship be established between the age of marriage and violence in families? Saeed Peyvandi: In my opinion, if we define family formation today as an important social responsibility and look at it from this perspective, it is very important that a girl and a boy decide to marry when they have at least some social maturity and can manage a family life or understand its concept. What has changed in human society over the past fifty or sixty years is that we did not have something called youth in the past. We had childhood and adolescence, and the rest became adults. Today, a new group called youth has emerged, and this is very important in the processes of experiential learning and social maturity. Therefore, the appropriate age for marriage and accepting family responsibilities cannot be compared with a hundred or two hundred years ago, and from this perspective, what is regrettable in Iran is that all pressures in recent years have been on getting girls and boys to marry earlier, before they have the necessary social maturity and knowledge to live under one roof with another person, entering life responsibilities without the necessary maturity or experience. In fact, the social experiences that should help them manage this life have not been sufficiently acquired, and for this reason, they either divorce early or family violence becomes prevalent there. All these phenomena and consequences are a result of a policy that has been heavily emphasized in Iran, especially in recent years, pushing young people towards early marriage, and later our society will face all the consequences of such policies, including what you mentioned: the prevalence of violence. A twenty-one-year-old man, whose name was not mentioned in the news, told the authorities in Pakdasht that in the six months since he married his twenty-year-old wife, he had left the house three times and intended to divorce, but ultimately killed her because she was chatting with her friends on Viber. This decision to divorce led to the murder of the twenty-year-old woman, while officials have stated that in the first nine months of this year, divorces in Tehran province increased by 20 percent. Mehrdad Darvishpour, a sociologist residing in Sweden, says: Economic pressures in society have seriously increased. Greater economic difficulties lead to many separations. But besides the economic pressure, there is a gender aspect. In our society, a generation, especially the younger one, deals with values and a type of greater feminine self-awareness; therefore, we face a contradictory situation. Government laws and regulations work to strengthen the position of men in the family, but a kind of feminine self-awareness has seriously grown in Iranian society. The impact of this process is that many women with a higher level of education do not accept these patterns. Additionally, it should be noted that our society is one where a kind of individuality and attention to individual desires has increased. The increase in individuality means that the younger generation looks to see if their individual issues are being met. If forming a family cannot meet their individual issues, they will pursue their personal lives. Overall, the influence of modern lifestyle patterns has led to a decrease in the number of marriages in this sense and an increase in individual lifestyle patterns. Ghafar, a twenty-three-year-old, when he appeared before the judge, said it was ten in the morning when I woke up, I noticed the smell of burning food and saw my seventeen-year-old wife Zahra sleeping. I got angry. I beat her with a belt and went to the kitchen to start grilling eggplant, when Zahra came to the kitchen and intended to apologize, I burned her hand with a hot skewer. As reported, after that, Ghafar hit Zahra's head several times against the kitchen floor, leading to her death. Mr. Peyvandi, when a twenty-three-year-old young man commits such a murder, the first question that comes to mind is his level of education, a question that has not been answered in the news related to the case. Saeed Peyvandi: Statistically, there is always a direct relationship between those who commit murder, violence, or various forms of delinquency or social anomalies and their level of education. Therefore, the more education progresses and a person has, for example, a university education and studies at higher levels, the less likely they are to engage in such actions. This means that the background for such behavior becomes much more limited because the social position they achieve and the relationship they have with culture and knowledge causes them to distance themselves from violent behaviors. Although this is not absolute, there are also those with high education who can be violent. However, if this education is simultaneously accompanied by working on the issue of violence, with education on anti-violence culture, by showing examples of violence and the emergence of violence in society and tracing its roots, and efforts are made for young people and society to think about these issues and engage in critical thinking, then it can be said that both education and efforts to create a non-violent culture can have very fundamental impacts on reducing violence in society. But this is not limited to schools. We must simultaneously think about other places that can influence the socialization processes of children and especially young people, including mass media or reference individuals who can influence young people, such as artists, writers, or athletes. All of these can participate in this national effort to prevent or reduce the scope of violence. However, unfortunately, the trends that are progressing in our society do not make us very optimistic. Among them is the lack of work on violence, as I mentioned, and another point is that in the news that comes, even within the Iranian educational system, there are efforts for girls to marry before finishing their education, and they are encouraged to do so, and even legal barriers to prevent children from marrying in high school are practically ignored to encourage young girls to marry more. All policies at the educational level and in general lead us to face major social harms such as domestic violence, violence at the societal level, early marriages by individuals who do not yet have the necessary readiness and maturity for social life in this way, who do not have responsibility... all of these are the pathological consequences of ill-considered and unprofessional policies in our society that unfortunately occur.