A judicial official in the province of Hamedan said that 1,596 child brides married in the south central province last year.
The Social Deputy of Crime Prevention at the Hamedan Judiciary also said that from these marriages, 10% had led to divorce.
These kinds of marriages have dire consequences for child brides including child pregnancy, death from childbirth, depression and sometimes suicide in addition to divorce and lack of education.
Golestani also said that 50% of divorces were registered in the first five years of marriages in Hamedan.
“Last year, 508 of the divorces that were registered were for couples who had been married for less than one year,” he added.
According to official sources, the marriages of at least 37,000 child brides between the ages of 10 to 14 were registered in Iran in 2017. This does not include marriages that were not legally registered.
Reports also indicate that there are 24,000 divorcees under 18 in Iran, of which 15,000 are under the age of 15.
Another report published in Iranian media in 2017 said that 17% of child brides in Iran married under the age of 18. The numbers did not include “temporary marriages”, which is a spreading phenomenon in Iran.
According to Parvaneh Salahshouri, the head of the Women’s Commission in the parliament, “some 6% of those who get married are girls between 10 and 14 years of age.”
Other statistics show that in 2016, 5.5% of marriages were that of children while in 2014, 40,000 children married including 176 children who were under the age of 10.
Just in the past decade, close to 400,000 child brides were forced to marry in Iran despite being under 15 years of age.
Child marriage or marriage without the free and full consent of both spouses is a human rights violation and is not in line with several international agreements including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriage.
Source » irannewswire