Bid to stop child marriage

FEMALE MP IN JORDAN: ‘IT IS NOT AN EXCEPTION. IT IS HAPPENING EVERY DAY’

Legal age is 18 but girls can wed from age 15 with judge’s consent.

Beirut

AJordanian lawmaker praised for her role in abolishing a law that let rapists off the hook if they married their victims has set tackling child marriage as her next challenge.

Nearly 10 500 girls in Jordan were married before reaching their 18th birthdays in 2017, according to the most up to date figures from the UN children’s agency Unicef.

Girls in Jordan can be married from age 15 with a judge’s approval, even though the legal marriage age is 18. Lawmaker Wafa Bani Mustafa said that even raising it to 16 would reduce the numbers.

“This is not an exception. It is happening every day. Too many young girls are getting married,” the 39-year-old said during a recent visit to Beirut.

A significant proportion are believed to be Syrian girls after an influx of refugees, with families marrying off daughters young to give them financial security and protection from sexual violence.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled their homeland since the war started in 2011 and there are now more than 670 000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, according to the UN.

“If you are not old enough to vote or drive a car, how can you open a house and build a family,” said Bani Mustafa, one of only 20 women in Jordan’s 130-seat House of Representatives.

“We need to first change the culture by raising the age of exceptions to 16.

“Then slowly maybe this will be the first step to making it 18 with no exceptions.”

In 2017, Jordan’s parliament voted to abolish a law that allowed rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims after a years-long campaign led by Bani Mustafa. Now she is seeking a change to a section of the law governing inheritance.

As things stand, the children of a father who dies before his own parents will inherit the assets he would have received had he survived them, while the children of a mother who dies before her parents will not.

“If we push changing women’s rights through law, it will change the culture of the society to accept women’s rights.

The law helps change our society’s mentality,” she said.

“I will keep fighting for Jordanian women. We deserve better lives and equal rights to men.” – Reuters