Tahani (in pink) married her husband, Majed, when she was 6 and he was 25. Photo credit: NatGeo.com
Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports for The Guardian, Sept. 26, 2013, that Iran’s Parliament has passed a bill ostensibly to protect the rights of children, but which includes a clause that allows a man to marry his adopted daughter as young as 13 years.
Human rights activists have expressed alarm that the bill, approved by parliament on Sunday, opens the door for the caretaker of a family to marry his or her adopted child if a court rules it is in the interests of the individual child.
Presently in Iran, legal pedophilia is already the practice under the guise of marriage. Girls can marry as young as 13 provided they have the permission of their father and a judge; boys can marry after the age of 15. According to the Iranian news website Tabnak, as many as 42,000 children aged between 10 and 14 in Iran were married in 2010, among them were at least 75 children under the age of 10 in Tehran alone.
But marrying one’s stepchildren is forbidden under any circumstances. That would change under the new law.
Shadi Sadr, a human rights lawyer with the London-based group Justice for Iran, told the Guardian: “This bill is legalizing pedophilia. It’s not part of the Iranian culture to marry your adopted child. Obviously incest exists in Iran more or less as it happens in other countries across the world, but this bill is legalizing pedophilia and is endangering our children and normalizing this crime in our culture. You should not be able to marry your adopted children, full stop. If a father marries his adopted daughter who is a minor and has sex, that’s rape.With this bill, you can be a pedophile and get your bait in the pretext of adopting children.“
Iran’s Guardian Council, a body of clerics and jurists which vets all parliamentary bills before the constitution and the Islamic law, has yet to issue its verdict on the controversial legislation.
H/t Clash Daily
See also FOTM’s other posts on Muslim pedophilia:
- “Girl, 8, dies from internal injuries after wedding night in Yemen,” Sept. 11, 2013.
- “Muslim pedophilia: Afghan parliament rejects proposed law banning child brides,” June 14, 2013.
~Eowyn
Dr. Eowyn is the Editor of Fellowship of the Minds.
