100 million Tomans marriage loan and concerns about the increase in "child marriage" in Iran

The marriage rate for girls under 15 has increased dramatically as marriage loans have increased.

The increase in the amount of marriage loans in recent years has led to a rise in the number of child marriages in Iran. Official statistics show that the number of child marriages has quadrupled after the increase in the amount of marriage loans.

In May 2020, Maskan Bank announced in a resolution to all its branches in Iran that any couple whose wedding date is April 2020 will receive a marriage loan of 100 million tomans. This amount has increased significantly compared to the amount paid for marriage loans in the past.

The increase in the amount of marriage loans has increased the demand for these loans, especially at a time when a large segment of the population in Iran is struggling with very difficult living conditions.

Marriage loans are paid to girls from the age of 13 and to boys from the age of 15. Meanwhile, marriage loans for children under the age of 18 are provided to their parents.

The increasing demand for marriage loans, while existing laws in Iran have paved the way for forced marriage, especially among girls, has raised concerns about the rising number of child brides in Iran. This is despite the fact that the coronavirus pandemic in Iran, the mismanagement of the crisis in the country, and the intensification of international sanctions against Iran have placed a large segment of citizens in a very difficult economic situation.

In June of last year, Masoud Soltanifar, Minister of Sports and Youth, sent a letter to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, writing, "Analytical studies conducted regarding the increase in marriage loans over the past few years have not significantly helped this group's marriages, and have even witnessed an increase in cases such as buying and selling loans, forced marriages, divorces and remarriages, etc."

In this letter, the Minister of Sports and Youth, referring to the increase in the number of applicants for marriage loans with an average age of over 60 and under 15, asked Hassan Rouhani to notify the Central Bank of a government resolution regarding the rules and regulations related to imposing an age limit of 18 to 40 years for granting loans and that these facilities be paid only for first marriages.

Hassan Rouhani, following a request from the Minister of Sports and Youth to amend the age criteria for granting marriage loans, ordered the First Vice President and Head of the National Planning and Budget Organization to review and amend the law.

However, no action has been taken yet. The website for applying for a marriage loan, which has been launched by the Central Bank of Iran and the names of more than 30 banks are listed in this system for loan disbursement, does not have any terms and conditions regarding the age of marriage loan applicants.

In July 2020, Masoumeh Ebtekar, Iran's Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, referred to the increase in the amount of marriage loans and said: "With the increase in the amount of marriage loans, underage marriages have increased in the country."

The Iranian Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, referring to the fact that in marriages where people are under 18 years old, loans are made available to their parents, said: "With the increase in marriage loans, we have encountered several issues, including the increase in the number of children of the spouse, which is a concern for us, as well as the misuse of marriage loans for purposes other than marriage, which we believe should be made available to anyone who gets married and needs a loan."

Mohammad Mehdi Tondgoyan, Deputy Minister of Youth Affairs at the Ministry of Sports and Youth, announced the statistics on the payment of marriage loans to different age groups and said that "the number of girls under 15 has increased significantly after the increase in the amount of marriage loans."

Mohammad Mehdi Tondgoyan had said, "By the end of August 2019, 4,460 girls under the age of 15 had received marriage loans." This figure was 3,432 in 2018, and in 2017, the number of people under the age of 15 receiving marriage loans was only 51.

This official in the Ministry of Sports and Youth said that "in the first five months of 2019, 2,244 people over the age of 60 received marriage loans."

According to this official, this figure was about 3,530 people in 2018 and about 224 people in the entire 2017.

According to the quarterly report of the Statistical Center of Iran, during the first three months of 2020, 7,323 marriages of girls under the age of 14 were registered in the country. The report states that between 2016 and 2019, about 130,000 marriages of girls under the age of 14 and more than 100 marriages of boys under the age of 15 were registered.

This statistic, of course, is the number of registered marriages, and it is obvious that many marriages among girls under the age of 13 are not officially registered.

Marriage loans: paving the way for a life or spreading discrimination against girls

The spread of poverty in Iran and the decline in the economic power of a large segment of the population have made it a priority for families to try to obtain any form of government assistance. Marriage loans are one of these cases. A loan that is considered a special situation, especially for families with daughters.

Previously, Imam Qoli Tabar, inspector of the Supreme Assembly of Workers' Representatives, said that based on the definition of international organizations that consider the poverty line to be the minimum income that a person can live on in a country, considering the estimate of our country's poverty line at about 10 million Tomans for a family of four and the optimistic monthly salary of 3 million Tomans, it can easily be proven that workers (more than half of our country's population) live in absolute poverty.

The marriage of girls at an early age certainly causes many crises for them, one of the most important of which is undoubtedly the dropout of female students. An issue that has become even more apparent in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era in Iran and the difficulty of students' access to educational facilities in some regions of Iran.

A long-time director of girls' schools in North Khorasan, who spoke to the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran on condition of anonymity, said: "Low income levels and poor economic conditions have prevented many people from receiving any opportunity to obtain government financial assistance. In the case of marriage loans, this issue has turned a blind eye to the harms that girls face, such as dropping out of school and getting married at an early age."

Noting that girls always suffer the most in such situations, the public school principal told the Human Rights Campaign in Iran: "Since many families believe that daughters cannot play any effective role in the family economy, situations such as receiving a marriage loan are a good way for them to help the family economy."

This education director in North Khorasan Province, noting that there are no accurate statistics on dropouts and marriages of girls under the age of 15 or younger in this region, told the Human Rights Campaign: “In 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 educational director, after the increase in marriage loan rates, many families that were not even registering the marriages of girls under the age of fifteen registered some of these marriages because they received loans.

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran and the forced remote learning have left many low-income families 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.

There is no specific basis for determining the age of marriage in Iranian law. Only according to the resolution of the Expediency Discernment Council on July 1, 2002, "A marriage contract for a girl before reaching the full age of 13 solar years and for a boy before reaching the full age of 15 solar years is subject to permission, but on the condition of expediency, it is valid with the court's determination."

According to official statistics, the number of marriages of girls under the age of 10 in the first half of the 1990s was close to 1,200. Also, according to official statistics, in the first six months of the last solar year, the number of marriages of girls between the ages of 10 and 14 was 17,486, or about 7 percent of all marriages in the country.

According to Central Bank statistics, in the first six months of this year, the number of marriages of people under the age of 15 was four times higher than in the entire year 2018. This statistic comes despite the fact that the amount of marriage loans that year was 30 million Tomans.

Child marriage, as one of the most fundamental social harms in Iran, has always been more prevalent in some regions of the country. In some regions, cultural traditions are an important and perhaps the main reason for the continuation of child marriage, but the poor economic conditions of large segments of society have caused the phenomenon of child marriage to spread in urban areas or on the outskirts of cities.

In October of this year, Ali Amiri Rad, the governor of Khoda Afarin County, said that last year, out of 284 registered marriages in the county, 54 were under the age of 15, and said: "The spread of child marriage in this county has become a problem."

The official said, "Studies and field research on the reasons for child marriage should be conducted by welfare agencies, the health and treatment network, and education in cooperation with the civil registry."

The Factnameh Research Institute wrote in a report that, according to the yearbooks of 2016 and 2017 and referring to the information in the marriage statistics section, the number of marriages of girls under the age of 15 fluctuated between 35,000 and 41,000 between 2012 and 2017. This means that in the past 6 years, in 5 to 6 percent of registered marriages in Iran, the bride was under the age of 15.

A family lawyer and children's rights activist in Tehran, referring to the visible spread of poverty in this metropolis and the increase in the number of slums around the capital, told the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran: "Child marriage was previously a phenomenon that we mostly encountered in some villages or small towns, but now this problem has become very common among the slums."

“Policies like increasing marriage loans are just ways to encourage families to marry off their daughters at a young age and leave home to earn financial benefits,” the lawyer and children’s rights activist told the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. “Many of these children have no idea what marriage loans are, and they are just a tool for families to earn money.”

The children's rights activist told the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran: "The harm to girls who marry older men as children becomes apparent years later. As the number of child marriages has increased, the divorce rate among teenage girls has also increased."

According to the lawyer, in one of the divorce cases, his client was a 17-year-old girl who, at the age of 15, was forced by her father to marry her 55-year-old friend. Available documents show that her father had taken out a loan for his daughter's marriage. Less than two years into their marriage, the girl's father and husband were arrested for drug trafficking and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

According to the lawyer, "Although it is impossible to say for sure, it is not unlikely that in such a case, the money from the marriage loan 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 the age of 15 who have been pressured by their families to marry older men are never willing to return to their father's home after losing their husbands, and this is the beginning of a dangerous and stressful life for these unaccompanied women and their young children."

Lawmakers turn a blind eye to discrimination and deny the spread of child marriage 

According to statistics from the Ministry of Sports and Youth, the increase in the amount of marriage loans between 2017 and 2019 and the increase in the number of people under the age of 15 receiving these loans are directly related to each other. In 2017, there were only 51 recipients under the age of 15, but in the first half of 2019 alone, when the loan amount increased, 4,460 people applied for loans.

According to a children's rights activist and lawyer living in Tehran, "Officials say that many of these people are just applying for loans and that this does not mean child marriage, but no common sense would accept that a 15-year-old girl could be burdened with the responsibility of paying a loan of 50 million tomans to start a family and a marriage in which she has no role."

Although statistics show the impact of marriage loans on the child marriage crisis in Iran, the responsible authorities insist that the amount of marriage loans paid this year will be higher than before.

This children's rights activist tells the Human Rights Campaign in Iran: "Some families quickly divorce the child or teenager they have married after receiving a marriage loan, and this creates many hidden harms."

According to this lawyer and children's rights activist, "the lack of child protection laws in the country, on the one hand, and the legislators' emphasis on facilitating marriage with incentives such as loans, as well as defending early marriage under the pretext of preventing young people from getting involved in moral corruption, have caused the voice of the dangers of child marriage to be lost in the narrative of the authorities."

In previous years, some members of parliament have proposed plans and bills under the title of child marriage or amending Article 1041 of the Civil Code, but they have not yet reached any conclusions.

Article 1041 of the Iranian Civil Code, passed in 1934, set the marriageable age at 15 for girls and 18 for boys, and under certain circumstances and with a court certificate, girls could marry from the age of 13 and boys from the age of 15. Therefore, marriage under the age of 13 was completely prohibited.

After the Islamic Revolution and during the legal reforms in 1982, Article 1041 of the Civil Code, which prohibited child marriage, was declared unconstitutional, and in practice, the new law did not require court permission for child marriage. From 1982 onwards, the marriageable age for girls was reduced to 9 years and for boys to 15 years.

In 2017, a bill to amend Article 1041 was submitted to the Islamic Consultative Assembly, whereby the minimum age for marriage was set at sixteen full lunar years for girls and eighteen full solar years for boys, and marriages between the ages of thirteen to sixteen for girls and sixteen to eighteen for boys were subject to the permission of the guardian and consideration of the expediency and judgment of the court, provided that the person was physically fit for marriage, according to the opinion of a forensic physician.

This plan to abolish the marriage of girls under the age of 13 was rejected in 2018 by the Legal and Judicial Commission of the Islamic Consultative Assembly.

At the time, members of parliament noted that the opponents of this plan were primarily the country's religious authorities, who believed that abolishing the marriage of girls under 13 years of age was inconsistent with Islamic law and would lead society to follow Western laws.

However, some clerics in Iran supported the ban on child marriage. In February 2018, Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat Zanjani called child marriage “illegitimate.” The Shiite cleric said, “Marriage with children is unjust, and because it is unjust, it is not legitimate.”

Efforts by civil society groups and some members of parliament to pass a law banning the marriage of girls under 13 have continued in recent years, but no significant progress has been made in this regard.

Despite the increase in the number of child marriages in recent years, another group of parliamentarians and executive officials in the country have been indifferent to child support plans and have at various times defended plans such as increasing the amount of marriage loans.

After Hassan Rouhani's request to review the conditions for granting marriage loans, some members of parliament strongly opposed the president's request. Seyyed Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh, the deputy speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, stated that applying age discrimination in the payment of marriage loans is against Clause A, Note 16 of the Budget Law and Articles 3 and 19 of the Constitution, and said that "the parliament will not allow this."

Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani, another member of the parliament's presidium, also wrote on his personal Twitter page in response to this decision: "Mr. Rouhani's order regarding restrictions on the payment of marriage benefits is against the law, and proposing it in other councils is a way to weaken the legislative institution and bypass the parliament."

Reza Shiran Khorasani, a representative of the people of Mashhad and Kalat in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, said that "increasing the marriage loan has not had an effect on child marriage. The issue of child marriage is a social harm that is rooted in culture."

According to this representative, "the highest prevalence of child marriage is in areas where there have been fewer requests for marriage loans."

Seyyed Hassan Mousavi Chelak, the head of the Iranian Social Workers Association, also stated that various factors are involved in the creation of child marriage, telling PANA News Agency: "Part of child marriage is related to bad economic conditions, and this cannot be denied, and it is natural that in order to prevent this issue, dynamism must be created in the economic sphere, which unfortunately is not the case now, and the problems that people have in various fields are related to the economy."

Referring to the fourfold increase in the number of child marriages after the increase in the amount of marriage loans, he said: "One should be skeptical about presenting statistics related to child marriages."

According to this official, "Child marriage has existed in the country before, but to say that marriage loans are a factor in encouraging child marriage, even four times, I don't know if civil registration officials and banks should comment on these statistics."

A lawyer and children's rights activist told the Human Rights Campaign in Iran that "there is no serious determination among the country's legislators about the phenomenon of child marriage, and representatives are not listening to the repeated warnings of child rights activists. In a situation where the coronavirus issue has caused girls to drop out of school in families with less financial resources to become more common, the need to pursue children's rights is felt more, but instead, legislators seem to have other priorities."

The United Nations has consistently condemned child marriage in the Islamic Republic. In his July 2020 report, UN Special Rapporteur on Iran Javed Rehman said that child marriage in the Islamic Republic remains a “core concern” for the UN.

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), a “child” is anyone under the age of 18. In its reports on Iran, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed “serious concern” about the persistence of child marriage in Iran despite previous recommendations. According to the report, child marriage violates the rights of children, especially girls, and places them at risk of forced, early and temporary marriages, with irreversible consequences for their physical and mental health.

 

Source: Human Rights Campaign