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 it agreed not to use her real name and to use only 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’
Batta said that a few months after her father, Hussein, told her they were pulling her out of the fourth grade because they could not afford to send her to school, 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.”
Nonetheless, Batta said, her husband “treated me well” for the first year of their marriage, but after a year “his behavior towards me changed.”
“He started hitting me for anything I did, even if I was just watching television; he would hit me and say that I had no right to watch TV,” she said, adding that “even servants were treated better than I was.”
When her father died of cirrhosis two years after their wedding, she said, her husband would not allow her to attend the funeral.
Batta said that in July 2016, when she was just 14, he took her to the cleric who married them. Afterward, she said, he took her back to her family home and told her mother, “This is your daughter, and this is her divorce paper.”
“My mother never let me leave the house because she felt ashamed of what the neighbors would think,” she said. “Even my siblings didn’t treat me well. I became like a servant in the house, having to serve everyone.”
At 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 that she ran a brothel.”
“I work for her now,” she said. “I go with the other girls to one of the nightclubs, dancing in front of everyone and seducing men to get as much money as I can from them.”
At the end of each month, she said, the woman “distributes a quarter of the total amount we managed to obtain over the entire month, while the rest is considered rent and food money.”
‘Blatant violation of children’s rights’
Batta is by far not the only child in Iraq to have been married at a young age.
UNICEF reported in April 2023 that 28% of girls are married before the legal age of 18, although under Iraqi law, girls as young as 15 can be married with the consent of judges and their parents.
The potential consequences of child marriage were laid bare in a 2016 report by the United Nations Population Fund on the effects of child marriage in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, which said it “usually comes with unhealthy and ill-informed sexual relations that may include unwanted and forced sex, domestic rape, vulnerability to domestic violence and genderbased violence and adultery.”
That ultimately affects “the physical and mental well-being of child spouses,” the report said.
But lawmakers, predominantly from the Shia Muslim bloc, including the political parties Hikma, State of Law and Hukok, are nonetheless championing amendments to the Personal Status Law, also known as Law 188, suggesting they are in line with both Iraq’s Constitution and Islamic law. Iraq is predominantly Shia; around 40% of the population is Sunni Muslim.
Adopted in 1959, the current law unifies all segments of society under a single code while enshrining the rights of women and children. As well as setting the age of marriage, it addressed child custody, inheritances and alimony payments focused on the welfare of both children and women.
The law “was one of the most progressive in the Middle East,” according to Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank. It had survived “regime changes, wars, civil wars and conflicts throughout many, many decades,” he said.
The newly proposed amendments would take a large amount of decision-making power away from both families and the courts and place it into the hands of clerics, some of whom set the age of puberty at 9.
As a result, some lawmakers and rights groups are concerned that that would pave the way for legalizing and expanding child marriage in the country.
The parties proposing the changes “came in promising democracy and a better future for Iraqis,” Mansour said. But they failed to keep these promises, leading to increasing “disillusionment across the public” and widespread protests calling for better services, increased job opportunities and an end to corruption, he said.
“The ways in which they tried to gain legitimacy have waned,” he said. “And so this is an attempt by some of them to reassert that they are indeed religious parties and their legitimacy is based around religion.”
Three lawmakers who supported the proposed changes declined to be interviewed.
Some of those pushing for the changes have suggested that they could help lower divorce rates and boost family values.
Speaking to Iraqi broadcaster Al-Forat News in September, lawmaker Dunya Al-Shammari said they would protect “women and families from disintegration, and resorting to Islamic law is the best guarantor to preserve these rights.” She added that it would help to “achieve justice between men and women regarding child custody.”
Others, like fellow Shia lawmaker Alya Nassif, called for the proposals to be voted down, as similar amendments were in 2014 and 2017. Calling the proposals “dangerous,” Nassif said the law “threatens society and families.” She said members of parliament had been presented with “a collection of ideas written on two sheets of paper,” rather than “legal articles that are needed to be discussed for voting.”
Calling the proposed amendments a “blatant violation of children’s rights,” Kurdo Omar, an MP who represents the Kurdistan Alliance, said she thought it would harm Iraq’s “reputation both domestically and internationally.”
Both joined a lawmaker boycott of a second reading of the draft bill in early September, which prevented it from taking place, and both hope to scupper the amendments entirely.
Batta hopes they succeed.
“Changing the law will lead many underage girls to face circumstances similar to what I went through,” she said.
“I am sure that those who are trying to change the law do not allow their daughters to marry at a young age because they do not need the money. The issue is solely about money and nothing else.”
Khalid Razak
Khalid Razak is a producer for NBC News based in Baghdad.
