100 Million Toman Marriage Loan: Concerns Over Rising Child Marriage in Iran
The marriage rate of girls under 15 years old has increased significantly with the expansion of marriage loan amounts
The increase in marriage loan amounts in recent years has led to a rise in child marriage cases in Iran. Official statistics show that the number of child marriages has quadrupled following the increase in marriage loan amounts.
In May 2020, Iran’s Housing Bank announced in a directive to all its branches across Iran that any couple whose marriage contract was registered in March 2020 would receive a 100 million toman marriage loan. This amount represented a significant increase compared to previous marriage loan payments.
The increase in marriage loan amounts, at a time when large segments of Iran’s population are facing severe economic hardship, has increased demand for this loan.
Marriage loans are provided to girls from age 13 and boys from age 15. However, for children under 18 years old, the loan is provided to their parents.
The surge in marriage loan applications, coupled with existing Iranian laws that facilitate forced marriage—particularly among girls—has raised serious concerns about rising child marriage statistics in Iran. This comes as Iran grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, government mismanagement of the crisis, and intensifying international sanctions, which have pushed a large segment of citizens into severe economic hardship.
In June of last year, Masoud Soltanifar, Minister of Sports and Youth, sent a letter to former President Hassan Rouhani in which he wrote: “Analytical studies conducted regarding the increase in marriage loans over the past few years have not significantly helped this group’s marriages, and we have even witnessed an increase in cases such as loan trading, forced marriage, divorce and remarriage, etc.”
In his letter, the Minister of Sports and Youth, noting the increase in marriage loan applicants with average ages above 60 years and below 15 years, requested that President Rouhani direct the government to issue a directive to the Central Bank regarding regulations and laws to implement age restrictions between 18 and 40 years for loan provision, and that these facilities be limited to first marriages only.
Hassan Rouhani, following the Sports and Youth Minister’s request to revise age-related regulations for marriage loans, ordered the First Vice President and the Head of the State Organization for Planning and Budget to review and amend the law.
However, no action has been taken. The website for marriage loan applications launched by Iran’s Central Bank, which lists over 30 banks for loan disbursement, contains no conditions or regulations regarding the age of marriage loan applicants.
In July 2020, Massoumeh Ebtekar, Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, stated: “With the increase in marriage loan amounts, underage marriages in the country have become more prevalent.”
The Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, noting that in marriages involving individuals under 18 years old, the loan is provided to their parents, stated: “With the increase in marriage loans, we have faced several problems, including an increase in child marriage, which concerns us. There has also been misuse of marriage loans for purposes other than marriage. We believe loans should be provided to anyone getting married who needs financial assistance.”
Mohammad Mehdi Tandgoyan, Deputy Minister for Youth Affairs at the Ministry of Sports and Youth, announcing marriage facility payment statistics to different age groups, said: “The number of girls under 15 years old has also seen a significant increase following the rise in marriage loan amounts.”
Tandgoyan stated: “By the end of August 2019, 4,460 girls under 15 years old had received marriage loans.” This figure was 3,432 people in 2018 and only 51 individuals under 15 years old in 2017.
This official at the Ministry of Sports and Youth said: “In the first five months of 2019, 2,244 individuals over 60 years old received marriage loans.”
According to this official, this figure was approximately 3,530 people in 2018 and approximately 224 people in the entire year 2017.
According to Iran’s Statistical Center quarterly report, during the first three months of 2020, 7,323 girls under 14 years old were registered for marriage in the country. The report states that between 2016 and 2019, approximately 130,000 cases of marriages of girls under 14 years old and over 100 cases of marriages of boys under 15 years old were registered.
These figures, of course, represent registered marriages, and it is evident that many marriages involving girls under 13 years old are not formally registered.
Marriage Loans: Facilitating Life Formation or Expanding Discrimination Against Girls
The spread of poverty in Iran and the decline in economic power of large segments of the population has made obtaining any form of government assistance a priority for families. Marriage loans are one such measure. For families with daughters, marriage loans represent a particularly advantageous opportunity.
Previously, Imam Gholi Tabbar, Inspector of the National Workers’ Representatives Assembly, stated that based on the definition of international organizations, which define the poverty line as the minimum income that allows a person to live in a country, considering an estimated poverty line of about 10 million tomans for a four-member family in our country and a conservative estimate of monthly wages of 3 million tomans, one can easily prove that workers (more than half of our country’s population) live in absolute poverty.
Girl marriages at low ages, which certainly create numerous crises for them—one of the most important being school dropout—have become more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran, as students have faced difficulty accessing educational facilities in some regions.
A veteran school administrator in northern Khorasan, on condition of anonymity, told Human Rights Campaign in Iran: “Low income levels and poor economic conditions have caused many people not to miss any opportunity to obtain government financial assistance, and in the case of marriage loans, this issue has also blinded families to the harms of girls dropping out of school and marrying at young ages.”
This school administrator, noting that girls always bear the greatest harms in such circumstances, told Human Rights Campaign in Iran: “Since many families believe that daughters cannot play any meaningful role in the family economy, opportunities such as receiving marriage loans are a good way for them to contribute to the family economy.”
This educator in northern Khorasan, noting that there are no precise statistics on school dropout and marriage of girls under 15 or younger in this region, told Human Rights Campaign: “Throughout all these years, I and many teachers have never witnessed a decrease in the number of female students who dropped out of school.”
According to this educator, after the increase in marriage loan rates, many families who had not even registered marriages of girls under fifteen began registering some of these marriages in order to receive loans.
The spread of COVID-19 in Iran and the shift to remote learning have forced many low-income families to be unable to afford smartphones or tablets, and in these circumstances, the possibility of girls dropping out of school and consequently forced marriage among female students has increased.
Iranian law does not establish a specific basis for determining the marriage age. According to only a resolution by the Expediency Discernment Council dated July 22, 2002: “Marriage of a girl before reaching 13 years of age and a boy before reaching 15 years of age is conditional upon parental consent, subject to the benefit determination by the competent court.”
According to official statistics, marriages of girls under 10 years old in the first half of the 2010s were close to 1,200 cases. Also, according to official statistics, in the first six months of last year, the rate of marriages between girls aged 10 to 14 years was 17,486 cases, or about 7 percent of all marriages in the country.
According to Central Bank statistics for the first six months of the current year, marriages of individuals under 15 years old were four times the entire year 2018, a year when marriage loan amounts were 30 million tomans.
Child marriage, as one of the most fundamental social harms in Iran, has always been more prevalent in certain regions of the country. In some areas, cultural traditions are the main reason for the continuation of child marriage, but poor economic conditions in large segments of society have caused the phenomenon of child marriage to expand in urban and suburban areas as well.
In September of this year, Ali Amiri Rad, governor of Khodaafarin County, stating that of 284 registered marriages in the county last year, 54 were under 15 years old, said: “The spread of child marriage in this county has become a serious problem.”
This official stated: “Field research and studies on the causes of child marriage should be conducted by welfare agencies, health and medical networks, and education authorities in cooperation with the civil registration office.”
The Factnameh Research Institute reported that based on the yearbooks of 2016 and 2017 and reference to marriage statistics data, the number of marriages of girls under 15 years old during 2012 to 2017 fluctuated between 35,000 to 41,000 cases. This means that in the past 6 years, in 5 to 6 percent of registered marriages in Iran, the bride was under 15 years old.
A family lawyer and children’s rights activist in Tehran, pointing to the visible spread of poverty in this metropolis and the increase in marginalized populations around the capital, tells Human Rights Campaign in Iran: “Child marriage was previously a phenomenon we encountered mainly in some villages or small towns, but currently this problem is very prevalent among marginalized populations.”
This lawyer and children’s rights activist told Human Rights Campaign in Iran: “Policies such as increasing marriage loans are merely ways to encourage families to marry off their daughters at young ages, send them away from home, and gain financial benefit. Many of these children don’t even know what a marriage loan is—they are simply tools through which families generate income.”
This children’s rights activist told Human Rights Campaign in Iran: “The harms to girls who enter marriage to men older than themselves in childhood manifest years later. As the number of child marriages has increased, the rate of divorce among teenage girls has also increased.”
According to this lawyer, in one divorce case, her client was a 17-year-old girl who was forced by her father at age 15 to marry her father’s 55-year-old friend. Existing documents show that her father received the marriage loan for his daughter. Less than two years into the marriage, the girl’s father and husband were arrested on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
According to this lawyer: “Although one cannot say with certainty, it is not unlikely that in such a case the marriage loan money was invested in drugs, which is why my client’s father and husband are in prison.”
This children’s rights activist in Tehran says: “In many cases, girls under 15 who were forced by their families to marry men older than themselves, after losing their husbands, are never willing to return to their parents’ homes, which marks the beginning of a dangerous and stressful life for these unsupervised women and their young children.”
Lawmakers’ Closed Eyes to Discrimination and Denial of Expanding Child Marriage
Based on statistics from the Ministry of Sports and Youth, the increase in marriage loan amounts between 2017 and 2019 and the rise in the number of individuals under 15 years old receiving these loans are directly related. In 2017, recipients under 15 years old were only 51 people, but in just the first half of 2019, when the loan amount increased, 4,460 people applied for the loan.
According to the children’s rights activist and lawyer residing in Tehran: “Officials say many of these people are only loan applicants and this doesn’t mean child marriage, but no reasonable person would accept that a 15-year-old girl can take on the responsibility of repaying a 50 million toman loan for forming a family and a marriage she has no part in.”
Although statistics show the impact of marriage loans on the child marriage crisis in Iran, responsible officials insist that the amount paid in marriage loans should increase in the current year compared to before.
This children’s rights activist tells Human Rights Campaign in Iran: “Some families, after receiving marriage loans, quickly divorce the child or teenager they have married, creating many hidden harms.”
According to this lawyer and children’s rights activist: “The absence of protective laws for children in the country on one hand, and lawmakers’ emphasis on facilitating marriage with incentives such as loans, as well as defending early marriage under the pretext of preventing youth from moral corruption, has caused the warnings about the dangers of child marriage to be lost in officials’ narratives.”
In recent years, some parliamentarians in different sessions have introduced bills and proposals regarding child marriage or amending Article 1041 of the Civil Code, which have gone nowhere.
Article 1041 of Iran’s Civil Code, enacted in 1934, set the marriage age at 15 for girls and 18 for boys, and under special circumstances with court certification, girls from age 13 and boys from age 15 could marry. Therefore, marriage under 13 years old was completely prohibited.
After the Islamic Revolution, during legal reforms in 1982, Article 1041 of the Civil Code, which prohibited child marriage, was deemed contrary to Sharia, and effectively in the new law, court permission was not required for child marriage. From 1982 onwards, the effective marriage age for girls became 9 years old and for boys 15 years old.
In 2017, a proposal to amend Article 1041 was presented to the Islamic Consultative Assembly, according to which the minimum marriage age for girls was set at 16 years and for boys 18 years, and marriage between ages 13 to 16 for girls and 16 to 18 for boys was conditional on parental permission, considering the child’s welfare, and court determination based on medical fitness for marriage with the opinion of the Forensic Medicine Organization.
This proposal was rejected in 2018 by the Islamic Consultative Assembly’s Legal and Judicial Commission for eliminating marriages of girls under 13 years old.
Parliamentarians noted at that time that the opponents of this proposal are primarily the country’s religious authorities who, in their view, eliminating marriages of girls under 13 years old would be inconsistent with Sharia law and would lead society toward following Western laws.
However, some Iranian clerics supported the prohibition of child marriage. Ayatollah Abdollah Asadollahi Zanjani in February 2019 called child marriage “unlawful.” The Shiite source of emulation said: “Marriage with children is unjust, and since it is unjust, it is not lawful.”
Efforts by civil society groups and some parliamentarians to pass a law prohibiting marriages of girls under 13 years old have continued in recent years, but to date, no significant progress has been made in this regard.
Despite rising child marriage statistics in recent years, another group of parliamentarians and government officials have been indifferent to child protection proposals and have defended at various points proposals such as increasing marriage loan amounts.
Following Hassan Rouhani’s request to review the conditions for granting marriage loans, some parliamentarians strongly opposed the request. Seyyed Amir Hossein Ghazi Zadeh, Deputy Speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, stating that implementing age discrimination in marriage loan payments violates section A of note 16 of the budget law and articles 3 and 19 of the Constitution, said that “Parliament will not allow this action.”
Also, Ahmad Amirabad Farahi, another member of the parliament’s leadership council, in response to this decision, wrote on his Twitter page: “Mr. Rouhani’s order regarding restrictions on marriage facility payments is against the law, and introducing it in other councils undermines the legislative institution and bypasses parliament.”
Reza Shiran Khorasani, representative of Mashhad and Kalat in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, said: “The increase in marriage loans has had no impact on child marriage; the issue of child marriage is a social harm rooted in culture.”
According to this representative’s claim, “the most child marriage occurs in areas that have had less marriage loan applications.”
Seyyed Hassan Mousavi Chelek, Head of the Association of Social Workers of Iran, stating that various factors are involved in child marriage, told PANA news agency: “Part of child marriage is related to poor economic conditions, and we cannot deny this fact. Naturally, to prevent this, there must be economic dynamism, which unfortunately is not currently the case, and the problems people face in various sectors are related to the economy.”
Referring to the statistic of child marriage increasing fourfold after the rise in marriage loan amounts, he said: “Statistics related to child marriage should be doubted.”
According to this official: “Child marriage has existed in the country before, but to say that marriage loans are a factor encouraging child marriage, and a fourfold increase at that, I don’t know—certainly the civil registration officials and banks should comment on these statistics.”
A lawyer and children’s rights activist tells Human Rights Campaign in Iran that “there is no genuine will among the country’s lawmakers regarding child marriage, and parliamentarians are deaf to repeated warnings from children’s rights activists. At a time when the coronavirus crisis has made school dropout more common among girls from low-income families, the necessity of pursuing children’s rights is felt even more, but instead, lawmakers seem to have other priorities.”
The United Nations has consistently strongly condemned child marriage in the Islamic Republic. Javaid Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, in his July 2020 report, stated that child marriage in the Islamic Republic remains among the “main concerns” of the United Nations.
According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), any person under 18 years old is considered a “child.” The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, in its reports on Iran, has expressed “serious concern” about the persistence of child marriage in Iran despite previous recommendations. According to this report, child marriage violates children’s rights, especially those of girls, exposing them to the risk of forced, early, and temporary marriages with irreversible consequences for their physical and mental health.
Source: Human Rights Campaign
