Sarah Hussein remembers the weight of her classmate’s textbooks stacked awkwardly in her arms. She was just 11 years old and had come to collect them after the girl, Esraa, was pulled out of school to be married. As Esraa’s mother handed them over, she muttered something Hussein would never forget: “A girl’s ultimate place is her husband’s house, not school.”

Hussein didn’t understand everything then, but she understood enough. A few months after her classmate had been married off­, Hussein heard she had died — killed by complications from a pregnancy her body was too young to carry.

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In the wake of Esraa’s death, her teachers said nothing, Hussein recalls. There was no funeral announcement. No story in the news. No inquiry. No outrage. The silence made young Sarah angry. In Iraq, anger can be dangerous. But for Hussein, now a 27-year-old pharmacist, it became a quiet form of courage.

Iraq’s failure to protect women and children is rooted in the tangled influences of religion, politics and law. Although the country remains a signatory to international treaties prohibiting child marriage, its enforcement is weak. Despite regulations that were put in place after the 2003 U.S. invasion to try to address the issue, Sunni and Shia sectarian parties and clerics — representing the two main branches of Islam — have exploited religious rhetoric to justify child marriage and reinforce patriarchal norms.

The 2005 Iraqi constitution enshrined sect-based legal pluralism, granting Shia and Sunni clerics broad authority over personal status matters, including marriage, divorce and custody, through separate religious courts. On the surface, Iraq is a country with a constitution and formal institutions, but underneath, the arms of religious authority impose their patriarchal power through semi-official or informal channels, with girls and women as their primary targets. Legal ambiguity and the dismissal of reform as “western interference” have only deepened religion’s hold on marriage and other practices.

In 2024, Iraq took another troubling step by proposing amendments to its Personal Status Law that would allow girls as young as nine to be married. The change, pushed by conservative religious factions in parliament, also sought to expand the authority of Shia religious courts over family matters.

In the months leading up to the law’s passage, dozens of women protested in Najaf — one of Shia Islam’s most revered spiritual centres, where clerics wield immense influence and tradition runs deep. Hussein was among them.

“We didn’t even get to chant,” she says, describing women holding placards. “Religious men came and started shouting, threatening us. The police just watched. They did nothing to protect us.”

In that moment, it felt like the beginning of something bigger. The minimum marriage age in the new law was revised in January 2025 in response to public pressure, preserving the existing legal age of 18, or as young as 15 with parental and court approval. But many of the women who protested were later harassed, interrogated or silenced by their own families.

It’s not only danger but fear that keeps many Iraqis from protesting, stemming largely from the violence that marked the October 2019 Tishreen uprising against political corruption. Hundreds were killed by sniper fire and tear gas canisters; many more disappeared or were threatened into submission. For Hussein and others like her, those killings weren’t just a moment of national tragedy — they were a warning.

Hussein’s activism now happens behind closed doors, through encrypted apps and whispered meetings. She’s part of a small but determined resistance that refuses to normalize the erasure of women’s voices.

Even without a broad national plan to combat child marriage, these civil society efforts continue their work in defiance of both apathy and threats. For more than four years, Hussein and a small circle of women have collaborated with Iraqi lawyers and human rights groups to challenge the new law.

In February 2025, the revised Personal Status Law came into effect. While fears of a lower legal marriage age were averted, critics warned that the new law still harms women and girls. Couples could now choose to have their marriages governed by Shia religious law rather than civil law, creating different rights for different sects.

The amendment also legalized unregistered marriages, which functioned as loopholes to bypass Iraq’s legal marriage age. According to a 2021 UN report, 22 percent of unregistered marriages in Iraq involved girls under the age of 14.

The advocacy group has since shifted its focus to supporting those affected, especially in divorce cases, but religious courts are rarely sympathetic. “One cleric said, ‘If God allows it, who are you to oppose it?’” Hussein recalls.

In the café where we........

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