Iraq could allow marriage for girls as young as 9. A survivor says it will fuel rape and child abuse
Dec. 15, 2024, 3:00 PM GMT+5
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 agreed to not use her real name and to only use 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.”
‘She’s still a little girl’
A few months after her father, Hussein, told her they were pulling her out of the fourth grade because they couldn’t afford to send her to school, Batta said 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.
“On the first night, the night I lost my virginity, I didn’t know what this man was doing. I felt immense pain, and I cried as he knelt over me without being able to move my hands or feet,” she said. “I want to forget this day, even though I will never forget it.”