Nearly 1600 girls under the age of 15 married in the last Iranian calendar year, in the province of Hamadan, western Iran, according to the local director of Iran’s Census Organization.

Furthermore, Assad Hassanzadeh, disclosed that at least 44 44 girls under the age of 15 gave birth in the same period.

Marriage and pregnancy under the age of 18 have dire consequences for child brides. Many social harms related to women is due to early and forced marriages. Depression and sometimes suicide, along with divorce, school dropouts, and sustaining the cultural and economic poverty cycle are among those harms.

The Iranian regime signed the UN Convention on the Right of the Child in 1991 and ratified it three years later. Nevertheless, according to article 1041 of the country’s Civil Law, there is no minimum age for marriage in Iran.

Girl-child marriage, which is one of the examples of violence against women, has been institutionalized by the Iranian regime by setting the legal age of marriage at 13.

A bill to stop child marriages was recently blocked in the Majles, Iran’s parliament.

Figures from Iran suggest child-marriage is rampant in the country, with girls younger than 14 forced to take husbands. The practice is most prevalent in rural areas.

Most recently a judicial official in Hamedan said that 1,596 child brides married in the south central province last year.

The Social Deputy of Crime Prevention at the Hamedan Judiciary also said that from these marriages, 10% had led to divorce.

According to official sources, the marriages of at least 37,000 child brides between the ages of 10 to 14 were registered in Iran in 2017. This does not include marriages that were not legally registered.

Reports also indicate that there are 24,000 divorcees under 18 in Iran, of which 15,000 are under the age of 15.

Another report published in Iranian media in 2017 said that 17% of child brides in Iran married under the age of 18. The numbers did not include “temporary marriages”, which is a spreading phenomenon in Iran.

According to Parvaneh Salahshouri, the head of the Women’s Commission in the parliament, “some 6% of those who get married are girls between 10 and 14 years of age.”

Other statistics show that in 2016, 5.5% of marriages were that of children while in 2014, 40,000 children married including 176 children who were under the age of 10.

Just in the past decade, close to 400,000 child brides were forced to marry in Iran despite being under 15 years of age.