Warning About High Child Divorce Rates and Thousands of Orphaned Children 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 orphaned children in Iran; this comes as a bill banning marriage of children under 13 years old was recently rejected in parliament.
“Kamil Ahmadi,” a social researcher, stated on Wednesday, December 26, at the Childhood, Development and Social Policy Conference that 17 percent of marriages involve girls under 18 years old, saying that there are 14,000 orphaned children under 18 years old in Iran.
This expert, while repeating shocking statistics about child marriages, including the existence of hundreds of children under 10 years old and 95,000 cases of divorce among people under 19 years old only between the years 2011 to 2016, said that based on the increasing rate of divorce, the statistics show that the most unstable marriages occur at childhood ages.
Experts are warning about the negative consequences of child marriage at a time when a few weeks ago the judicial commission of the Islamic Consultative Assembly rejected the bill banning marriage under 13 years old due to what it called opposition from religious authorities.
Tayebeh Siavoshi, a member of the women’s faction in parliament, wrote on her Twitter after the rejection of this bill in the judicial and legal commission of parliament, that the reason for opposing this bill in the judicial and legal commission of parliament was religious and jurisprudential reasons.
According to Iran’s civil law, the marriage contract of a girl before reaching the age of 13 and a boy before reaching the age of 15 is subject to the consent of the guardian, which is possible on the condition of expediency with the determination of the competent court. Based on this same law, approximately 200 children under 10 years old marry annually.
This is while the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Iran has also joined, identifies people under 18 years old as children and has obligated governments to prevent any sexual abuse of children, including “encouraging or forcing children to participate 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, asked Iran to amend laws that force girls to marry even at the age of 9.
Sociologists, psychologists, and children’s rights organizations consider child marriage to be a form of sexual abuse with dimensions of emotional, psychological, 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 a society of minors and has negative consequences including increased divorce, domestic violence, infidelity, and depression.
Moreover, girls and boys who marry in childhood are usually deprived of education and do not have proper personality development.
While these negative consequences have been warned about repeatedly in recent years, Kamil Ahmadi at the Childhood, Development and Social Policy Conference announced that statistics from the years 2011 to 2016 indicate an increase in child marriages in Iran and the latest efforts to reform the law on marriage of children under 13 years old have also been stopped with opposition from religious authorities and the judicial commission.
Source: Voice of America
