Updated Oct. 11, 2024 at 12:30 p.m.*
-Analysis-
There is an inevitable link between the question of when a woman gets married and when she has children. In Iran, disturbingly, it’s also a question about girls.
Iranian health officials publicly declared this week that it was good for girls to begin bearing children at 15, Kayhan-London staff report.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Alireza Raisi, Iran’s deputy health minister, said women should ideally become pregnant between the ages of 15 and 49, urging the Islamic Republic to invest in having “youthful and educated’ families.
Deploring that “the marriage age in educated people has increased… and their number of children decreased,” Raisi placed extra emphasis on encouraging the more educated Iranians to marry and procreate young to “create a model” for the whole of society.
Facing a declining birthrate, Iran instituted in 2021 the “Law to Rejuvenate the Population,” which allowed for youth marriages that encouraged the practices of child brides,.
The head of the Rejuvenation Headquarters at the health ministry, Saber Jabbariyeh, said earlier this year that the state was lifting all restrictions on under-18 or over-35 pregnancies, which he said had been based on misconceptions about “marriage, conception and pregnancy.”
Separately, in September, journalist Abbas Abdi had observed that the state registry was no longer publishing childbirth figures and the age of mothers on a weekly basis, apparently to prevent the press reporting on births from mothers aged 10 to 14 years.
Sharia-based laws
The law itself was just one of multiple factors that have been fueling the phenomenon of underage marriage for girls, or child brides, in Iran.
The first factor is the country’s Sharia-based laws, which includes multiple restrictions on personal freedom and prohibits any abortion rights.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is imposing laws from the past with little regard for the social, political and cultural changes that have — at the very least — enhanced the place societies have given to the pursuit of happiness. Iran allows adults to marry off girls at an age when they can barely discern its full implications. This deprives girls of the right to personal development to benefit the family’s socio-economic interests, which are usually determined by an adult male.
Families believe marrying off a daughter for cash will solve some of their problems.
Who can deny that it is (any truly lawful) state’s duty to defend the rights of individuals — especially of society’s most vulnerable?
Second, the families in question are poor and uneducated, and believe marrying off a daughter for cash will solve some of their problems. The practice is already far from unusual among the poor in neighboring Afghanistan and has very likely increased since the Taliban regained power.
The Taliban have swiftly undone the limited freedoms Afghan women enjoyed and those gained in the preceding 20 years. Afghan families can marry off their daughters through dealers in a modern-day version of a slave market. The results are far worse than an unhappy marriage.
In Iran, it is difficult to say whether such desperate acts are influenced by four decades of Afghan migration into Iran, the “Talibanization” of Iranian society after 40 years of clerical rule, or the merciless force of economic needs. One thing is clear: for the helpless brides, early marriage ends their schooling and crushes their life prospects.
Women seen as property, incapable
Third, in Iran, women are often seen as property rather than as autonomous individuals or social protagonists. Their purpose is to serve men, run the home and raise as many children as the men deem fit. Their attire must be decent, which means modest and unprovocative to men’s eyes. Their inheritance and travel rights remain subject to the approval of their husband or father.
A fourth factor is a larger, Sharia-based view of women, which sees women as lesser or partially incapable individuals, who are akin to minors and are, therefore, in need of social patronage and protection. This view downgrades the juridical value of their testimonies and classifies them as unfit for various positions of responsibility.
The regime may itself have become one of the causes of household strife and violence in Iran.
Since 2017, the country has registered around 184,000 marriages of girls aged less than 15 years, 5,000 of which were later annulled. Underage marriages have risen particularly on the edges of big cities, says Mansur Fathi, a social work lecturer at Tehran’s Allameh Tabataba’i University. In any case, the figure indicates, the pervasive, if not calamitous, state of socio-economic poverty and the collapse of stable family life in Iran.
Iran’s religious laws do not deem it necessary for a woman to complete her education, believing physical maturity is all a woman needs to perform the tasks for which she is, supposedly, destined. This inevitably affects the quality of family life and the way children, future citizens, are raised. Such conditions must give way to full juridical equality between men and women, wherein women enter a marriage being fully cognizant of their rights and wishes. This will require cultural work on families, but also legal, legislative and economic work, which is the state’s responsibility.
Violence and death
Intermittently there are reports of former child brides killing themselves or turning on their spouses, in-laws or even their own families and in cases, killing them. These are the wages of injustice, resentment and desperation. Who is to blame when extreme violence erupts in a household, with a husband or wife as victim?
For the Islamic Republic, judging by court verdicts and cases like the recent execution of a former child bride who had killed her husband, the wife is usually more guilty. It remains to be seen whether murderous men are punished as briskly and harshly as these desperate housewives. Beside the state, we can also blame inadequate social and religious education, and the mindless conformism these induce.
When the Islamic Republic hangs a former child-bride for killing her husband, it compounds the evil of social violence. There is no justice there in terms of rectification. Indeed with its partial use of executions in such cases, the regime may itself have become one of the causes of household strife and violence in Iran.
Originally published Jan. 23, 2024, this piece was updated Oct. 11, 2024 at 12:30 p.m. with news about the health officials statements about child-bearing at 15.
