Iraq could allow marriage for girls as young as 9. A survivor says it would fuel rape and child abuse.
Changes to Iraq’s Personal Status Law could allow girls as young as nine to get married.
BAGHDAD — 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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