2023-05-05 00:09:51
Baghdad / Obelisk Al-Hadath: While UNICEF announced that child marriage rates, especially for girls, continued to decline in the last decade in the world, but at a very slow pace, Iraq is still witnessing the expansion of the phenomenon of child marriage before the age of 18 years.
The increase in the rate of underage marriages is primarily caused by poverty and tribalism, which abound in rural and marginalized areas.
Most of the cases are carried out outside the court by an authorized person, who is usually a mosque sheikh or religious man in the village or region.
Statistics for the year 2021 indicated that women who married before reaching the age of 18 amounted to 25.5 percent, while the results of the survey showed that the percentage of the same indicator in the Kurdistan region amounted to 22.6 percent.
Writer Tamari Alaa says in her article that the most prominent reasons for the increase in divorce cases are early marriages under the age of 18, noting that this marriage leads to negative repercussions and effects, the most prominent of which is depriving girls of childhood and adolescence, and imposing great responsibilities on them.
Lawyer Hussein Al-Tamimi considered that underage marriages in Iraq are rosy dreams that turn into nightmares between unconsciousness and economic motives.
Social researcher Zahraa al-Saadi says that there are clan, social, and economic reasons that prompted an increase in the marriage of minors, as the difficult living situation and the increase in unemployment for the head of the family push him to marry off his minor daughters in return for certain sums of money, and this led to family disintegration and an increase in early divorce cases.
The AFP report said that UNICEF has made progress in abandoning the practice of child marriage, especially in the past decade, but this progress is not sufficient, adding that if the world continues at the same pace, it will take 300 years until the last country in the world eliminates child marriage.
According to the report, 640 million girls and women living today were married during their childhood, or 12 million girls annually.
He added that the percentage of young women who married as children has fallen from 21 percent to 19 percent since the last estimates were issued five years ago.
The report warned that Sub-Saharan Africa, which has the second largest share of the global total of child brides (20 percent), would take more than 200 years to end the practice at the current rate of progress.
Latin America and the Caribbean is also lagging behind, and is on a trajectory that will make its child marriage rate the second highest regional rate in the world by 2030, according to the report.
And in the regions of the Middle East and North Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, progress has stalled in them after periods of continuous progress, according to UNICEF.
As for South Asia, according to the report, it continues to push the global reduction of child marriage and is on the path to ending this phenomenon after nearly 55 years.
The report notes that India, which has achieved record progress in recent decades, still has about a third of the global total of child marriages.
UNICEF warned that girls who marry as children face direct and lifelong consequences, are less likely to stay in school, and face a greater risk of early pregnancy, which in turn increases the risk of health complications and deaths among children and mothers.
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