BAGHDAD – She was just 11 when she was sold into marriage to a man 36 years her senior. In the nine years since, she says she was raped, beaten, divorced and returned to her family, who hid her out of shame and forced her into slavery.
Today she is a sex worker in the Iraqi city of Erbil, where she recently moved from the capital Baghdad.
Batta said her husband raped her on their wedding night and beat her regularly before sending her back to her family three years after they married. Instead of expressing sympathy, they treated her like a pariah, she said. NBC News does not normally identify alleged victims of sexual assault and agreed not to use her real name and to use only her parents’ first names.
Now she fears other young girls will be subjected to similar ordeals if lawmakers approve proposed amendments to Iraq’s personal status law, which could allow marriage for girls as young as 9 and give religious authorities the power to decide family matters, including marriage, divorce and child abuse. 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 if 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 experience.”
‘She’s still a little girl’
A few months after her father, Hussein, told her they were pulling her out of fourth grade because they couldn’t afford to send her to school, Batta said she heard an argument between her parents.
She said her mother, Hana’a, 55, shouted at him, saying, “She’s still a little girl, aren’t you afraid of God?” She still plays with children; How can she bear the responsibility of being a wife? She doesn’t even know how to cook 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 not let her cook. The man just wants to get married,” Batta said she heard him say, before adding, “She will get married whether you accept it or not.”
Protesters voice their support for the proposed change to Iraq’s personal status law during a rally in Tahrir Square in central Baghdad.
Batta said she “had just turned eleven when my father asked me to take a shower and wear nice clothes.” Afterwards, she said he took her to a meeting of a group of men, including a clergyman. “I later learned that one of them was the man who would become my husband, while the other two were witnesses to the marriage,” she said.
She later said she learned that her father had received 15 million Iraqi dinars, or about $11,300, from the man, part of which he used to buy a new taxi. “I also heard that my husband was 47 years old,” she added.
“The first night, the night I lost my virginity, I didn’t know what this man was doing. “I felt immense pain and cried as he knelt over me without being able to move my hands or feet,” she said. “I want to forget this day, even if I will never forget it.”
Nevertheless, Batta said her husband “treated me well” for the first year of their marriage, but that after a year “his behavior toward me changed.”
“He started hitting me for everything I did, even when I was just watching TV; he hit me and said I had no right to watch TV,” she said, adding that “even servants were treated better than me.”
When her father died of cirrhosis of the liver two years after their marriage, she said her husband would not allow her to attend the funeral.
When she was just 14, Batta said he took her to the same cleric who married them in July 2016. Then she said he took her to her parents’ home and told her mother, “This is your daughter, and these are her divorce papers.”
“My mother never let me leave the house because she was ashamed of what the neighbors would think,” she said. “Even my brothers and sisters didn’t treat me well. I became like a servant in the house and had to serve everyone.”
At the age of 16, she said she decided to run away from home and go to Baghdad. There she said she met a woman on social media who offered her a place to stay “only to find out she was running a brothel.”
“I work for her now,” she said. “I go to one of the nightclubs with the other girls, dance in front of everyone and seduce men to get as much money from them as possible.”
At the end of each month, she said, the woman distributes “a quarter of the total amount we raised for the entire month, while the rest is considered rent and food money.”
‘Sharp violation of children’s rights’
Batta is far from the only child in Iraq who married at a young age.
UNICEF reported in April 2023 that 28% of girls marry before the legal age of 18, although girls as young as 15 can marry under Iraqi law with the consent of a judge and their parents.
The potential consequences of child marriage were exposed in a separate 2016 report from the United Nations Population Fund on the effects of child marriage in the Northern Kurdish region of Iraq, which stated that it “usually involves unhealthy and ill-informed sexual relationships , which may include unwanted sexual relationships. and forced sex, domestic rape, vulnerability to domestic and gender-based violence and adultery.”
This ultimately impacts “the physical and mental well-being of child spouses,” the report said.
But lawmakers, mainly from the Shia Muslim bloc, including the Hikma, State of Law and Hukok political parties, are nevertheless in favor of changes to the Personal Status Law, also known as Law 188, suggesting that these are in line with both Iraqi Constitution as Islamic law. Iraq is predominantly Shia, although about 40% of the population is Sunni Muslim.
The current law, passed in 1959, unites all segments of society under a single code while enshrining the rights of women and children. In addition to determining the age of marriage, it also dealt with child custody, inheritance and alimony payments, aimed at the well-being of both children and women.
The law “was one of the most progressive in the Middle East,” said Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House. It had survived “regime changes, wars, civil wars and conflicts for many, many decades,” he added.
But the newly proposed changes would take a large amount of decision-making power away from both families and the courts and put it in the hands of clergy, some of whom have set puberty at age 9.
As a result, some lawmakers and rights groups are concerned that this would pave the way for legalizing and expanding child marriage in the country.
The parties proposing the changes “promised democracy and a better future for Iraqis,” Mansour said. But they had failed to deliver on these promises, leading to growing “public disillusionment” and widespread protests calling for better services, more jobs and an end to corruption, he added.
“The ways in which they tried to gain legitimacy have diminished,” he said. “And so this is an attempt by some of them to reaffirm that they are indeed religious parties and that their legitimacy is based on religion.”
A girl holds a sign as activists demonstrated against female child marriage in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square earlier this year.
NBC News approached three lawmakers who supported the proposed changes. They all declined to be interviewed.
Some of those pushing for legal changes have suggested that these could help reduce divorce rates and increase family values.
Speaking to Iraqi broadcaster Al-Forat News in September, parliamentarian Dunya Al-Shammari said they would “protect women and families from disintegration, and that resorting to Islamic law is the best guarantee to preserve these rights.” She added that it would help “achieve justice between men and women regarding child custody.”
Others, such as fellow Shiite lawmaker Alya Nassif, called for the proposals to be voted down, just as similar amendments did in 2014 and 2017. Nassif called the proposals “dangerous” and said the law “threatens society and families.” She added that MPs had been given ‘a collection of ideas written on two sheets of paper’, rather than ‘legal articles to be discussed before the vote’.
Kurdo Omar, a lawmaker representing the Kurdish Alliance, called the proposed amendments a “blatant violation of the rights of the child” and said she believed it would damage Iraq’s “reputation, both nationally and internationally” if they were are adopted.
Both joined a boycott by MPs of a second reading of the bill in early September, which succeeded in preventing it, and both hope to thwart the amendments entirely.
Batta, for example, hopes they succeed.
“Changing the law will result in many underage girls facing conditions similar to what I experienced,” she said.
“I’m sure those who are trying to change the law don’t let their daughters get married at a young age because they don’t need the money. It’s all about money and nothing else.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
