In England and Wales, a new law requires people to be 18 years of age to get married. It seems obvious, perhaps, but so far in both countries people could get married even at 16 or 17 if they had parental consent and there was no law on forced marriages between minors, a problem that still hasn’t been eradicated. According to UNICEF, 650 million girls have been married off in the world today. About half of child marriages take place in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, India and Nigeria, but even European countries are not immune from this practice, including Italy.
“At the age of 16, my childhood was stolen from me when I found myself standing in a London garden in my wedding dress in front of a man twice my age.I didn’t know,” activist Paizi Mahmod, who has fought for years to ban early marriage in the United Kingdom, said several times. circumstances with a penalty of up to seven years in prison.However, the changes, as explained BBC they do not apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the minimum age for marriage remains 16. In Northern Ireland, parental consent is required for children under 18, but not in Scotland. Mahmod, who lost his sister to an abusive husband and was killed by her father and uncle, said it was “probably one of the most important days of my life.” “I was there myself,” she said. BBC news“I saw my sister go through an early marriage. And I’ve seen the devastating impact this can have on many women and girls.”
In Italy, at the moment, marriages between minors are not valid, but you can request permission from the court to marry from the age of 16. With the Red Code in 2019 it was introduced whose offense is punishable by imprisonment (one to five years) of anyone who, through violence or threats, forces a person into marriage or a civil union. Despite this, according to the Forensic Service of the Main Criminal Police Department, from 2019 to 2021, 35 cases of forced marriages were identified in our country. 85% of the victims are women, a third of whom are minors and mostly of foreign origin. A submerged phenomenon that is little talked about, but which resurfaces dramatically in stories such as that of Saman Abbas, who was murdered at the age of eighteen in Novellare, in the province of Reggio Emilia, by her own family after she spoke out against forced marriage.
Source: Elle