The Iraqi parliament has announced plans to lower the age of consent for girls from 18-years-old to just 9-years-old, effectively legalizing child rape in the country.

“This is a catastrophe for women,” said Raya Faiq, the coordinator for a coalition of groups opposing the law change, which also includes some Iraqi MPs.

“My husband and my family oppose child marriage. But imagine if my daughter gets married and my daughter’s husband wants to marry off my granddaughter as a child. The new law would allow him to do so. I would not be allowed to object. This law legalizes child rape.”

The pro-pedophilia law is bringing back a Taliban-style of slashing women’s rights and promoting rampant pedophilia in society. 

As well as slashing the legal marriage age, the legislative amendment will also remove women’s rights to divorce, child custody and inheritance.

Iraqi citizens have protested on the streets of the country’s capital, Baghdad, and other cities around the country. The protests have been met with clashes against local law enforcement.

Although marriage under the age of 18 has been a national law since the 1950s, a survey by Unicef found that 28% of girls in Iraq got married before they turned 18.

An Iraqi child clutches her mother’s abaya in Tikrit, Iraq in 2024

Nadia Mahmood, co-founder of the Iraq-based Aman Women’s Alliance, said the male-dominated MP in Iraq feels threatened by a movement of youth organizations and women.

“Following the mass youth protests which took place in Iraq in 2019, these political players saw that the role of women had begun to strengthen in society,” said, according to a report by the Guardian. “They felt that feminist, gender and women’s organizations, plus civil society and activist movements, posed a threat to their power and status … [and] began to restrict and suppress them.”

There have been 25 female members of Iraq’s government who tried stopping the proposed law from going to a second vote, but they say the strong opposition by their MP colleagues has made it nearly impossible.