Iraq Could Allow Marriage for Girls as Young as 9

She was just 11 when she was sold into wedlock with a man 36 years her senior. In the nine years since, she said, she has been raped, beaten, divorced and returned to her family, who hid her away out of shame and forced her into servitude.

Today she is a sex worker in the Iraqi city of Erbil, having moved there recently from the capital, Baghdad.

Batta said her husband raped her on their wedding night and regularly beat her before he sent her back to her family three years after they were married. Instead of offering sympathy, they treated her as a pariah, she said. NBC News does not normally identify alleged victims of sexual assault, and it agreed not to use her real name and to use only the first names of her parents.

Now she fears other young girls will be subjected to similar ordeals if lawmakers pass proposed amendments to Iraq’s Personal Status Law that could allow marriage for girls as young as 9, as well as give religious authorities the power to decide on family affairs including marriage, divorce and the care of children.

“Changing the law will give parents the right to sell their young daughters,” Batta said in a telephone interview last month. “I don’t want to call it marriage, because when a girl gets married at the age of 9 or 10, it means her family has sold her. It also allows men to exploit the poverty that many Iraqi families are experiencing.”

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Batta said that a few months after her father, Hussein, told her they were pulling her out of the fourth grade because they could not afford to send her to school, she overheard an argument between her parents.

She said her mother, Hana’a, 55, was shouting at him, saying: “She is still a little girl. Don’t you fear God? She is still playing with children; how can she bear the responsibility of being a wife? She doesn’t even know how to cook any food; she doesn’t even know how to fry an egg.”

Her father replied that the man who was going to marry her was “a respectable man.”

“Yes, he is older than her, but he will treat her well and won’t make her cook. The man just wants to get married,” Batta said she heard him say, before he added, “She will marry whether you accept or not.”

Batta said she “had just turned 11 when my father asked me to take a shower and wear nice clothes.” Afterward, she said, he took her to a gathering of a group of men, including a cleric. “I later learned that one of them was the man who would be my husband, while the other two were witnesses to the marriage,” she said.

Later, she said, she learned that her father had received 15 million Iraqi dinars, or around $11,300, from the man, part of which he used to buy a new taxi. “I also learned that my husband was 47 years old,” she added.

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But lawmakers, predominantly from the Shia Muslim bloc, including the political parties Hikma, State of Law and Hukok, are nonetheless championing amendments to the Personal Status Law, also known as Law 188, suggesting they are in line with both Iraq’s Constitution and Islamic law. Iraq is predominantly Shia; around 40% of the population is Sunni Muslim.

Adopted in 1959, the current law unifies all segments of society under a single code while enshrining the rights of women and children. As well as setting the age of marriage, it addressed child custody, inheritances and alimony payments focused on the welfare of both children and women.

The law “was one of the most progressive in the Middle East,” according to Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank. It had survived “regime changes, wars, civil wars and conflicts throughout many, many decades,” he said.

The newly proposed amendments would take a large amount of decision-making power away from both families and the courts and place it into the hands of clerics, some of whom set the age of puberty at 9.

As a result, some lawmakers and rights groups are concerned that that would pave the way for legalizing and expanding child marriage in the country.

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