„At 22, Leila has been married more than half her life. In a way, she’s not alone. There are tens of thousands of child brides in Iran, where the legal age of marriage for girls is 13 with parental consent – and girls even younger can be married with permission from a judge. For boys, the age is 15.
The National Organization for Civil Registration statistics registered 37,000 underage marriages in the Islamic republic in the last Iranian year, which ended in March. The real number could be even higher, as many families reportedly don’t register underage marriages. (…)
Independent experts who reviewed Iran and other countries for the child rights watchdog [UN Committee on the Rights of the Child] expressed deep concern that Iran ‚allows sexual intercourse with girls as young as 9 lunar years and that other forms of sexual abuse of … young children is not criminalized.‘“
