Warning about the high rate of child divorce and the existence of thousands of child widows in Iran
Statistics presented at a conference on children indicate a high number of divorces among Iranian children and the existence of tens of thousands of child widows in Iran, while a bill banning the marriage of children under 13 was recently rejected in parliament.
Social researcher Kamil Ahmadi, speaking at the Childhood, Development, and Social Policy Conference on Wednesday, January 16, said that 17 percent of marriages involve girls under the age of 18, and that there are 14,000 widowed children under the age of 18 in Iran.
The expert also reiterated shocking statistics about child marriage, including the existence of hundreds of children under the age of 10 and the existence of 95,000 divorces involving people under the age of 19 between 1990 and 2005 alone, and said that based on the increasing divorce rate, statistics show that the most unstable marriages occur in childhood.
Experts' warning about the negative consequences of child marriage comes a few weeks after the Islamic Consultative Assembly's Judicial Commission rejected a proposal to ban marriages under the age of 13 due to what it called opposition from religious authorities.
After the committee rejected the bill, Tayyiba Siavoshi, a member of the Women's Faction of the Parliament, wrote on her Twitter that the reason for opposing the bill in the Judiciary and Legal Committee of the Parliament was religious and jurisprudential reasons.
According to Iranian civil law, the marriage of a girl before reaching the age of 13 and a boy before reaching the age of 15 is subject to the permission of a guardian, which is possible under the condition of expediency and the determination of a competent court. According to this law, about 200 children under the age of 10 are married every year.
This is despite the fact that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Iran has also joined, recognizes individuals under the age of 18 as children and obligates governments to prevent any sexual abuse of children, including "encouraging or coercing children to engage in any sexual activity."
Referring to this same convention, nearly three years ago, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, according to its experts' report, called on Iran to amend laws that force girls to marry even at the age of 9.
Sociologists, psychologists, and child protection associations consider child marriage to be a form of sexual abuse with dimensions of emotional, mental, and physical abuse.
Hadi Shariati, a member of the board of directors of the Association for the Protection of Children's Rights, told ISNA that child marriage leads to an immature society and has negative consequences, including an increase in divorce, domestic violence, infidelity, and depression.
Meanwhile, girls and boys who marry as children are usually deprived of education and do not have proper personality development.
While these negative consequences have been warned about many times in recent years, Kamil Ahmadi, the head of the Childhood, Development, and Social Policy Conference, announced that statistics from 1990 to 2006 indicated the growth of child marriage in Iran, and the latest efforts to amend the law on marriage of children under 13 have also been halted due to opposition from authorities and the judicial commission.
Source: Voice of America
