Despite child marriage being illegal in Indonesia, the province of South Sulawesi has been the source of numerous viral stories about underage brides and grooms in recent months, the latest of which involves a 17-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy.
The Religious Affairs Department in Banteng Regency, South Sulawesi said they were made aware of the illegal marriage, performed last Thursday, which was reportedly done in secret by the families involved.
“The marriage between a 13-year-old groom and a 17-year-old bride was carried out by their parents. We’re not sure if there was an imam (cleric) during their vows. They married without the knowledge of the [district religious affairs office] and they discretely performed the marriage without reporting it [to officials],” Bantaeng Regency Religious Affairs Department Spokesperson Mahdi told Kompas.
Mahdi added that the religious affairs office would have turned down the couple had they applied for marriage certificates. It’s not yet known whether or not the government would intervene in this case and if anyone involved in the couple’s union would be subject to criminal sanctions.
The current legal age of marriage in Indonesia is 19 years old for men and 16 years old for women. However, the country’s 1974 Law on Marriage also includes a major loophole to this requirement which allows marriages to still be considered legal if they are done “in accordance” with religious belief, known as nikah siri. As such, underage marriages that have been sanctified by religious courts or officials must still be officially recognized by the government — if not, many are satisfied with merely fulfilling religious or traditional requirements for marriage.
Last month, the government intervened to annul a marriage between a 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl in South Kalimantan as it did not meet legal and religious requirements. Their marriage was religiously sanctified by a village official before religious officials at the district level and child protective services stepped in to annul the marriage and ensure the children went back to school.
However, in South Sulawesi, a trend has emerged in recent months in which families sought and acquired legal dispensation from the local religious court in order to get their children legally married. One case in April was particularly widely reported in the media, involving a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old who received court approval to legally marry after their initial marriage request was denied by the local religious affairs office. In reaction to the shocking case, President Joko Widodo has agreed to sign a regulation raising the minimum age for marriage and effectively end child marriage, though there have been no reports that it has been signed since.
In April of last year, Indonesian female Muslim clerics issued an unprecedented fatwa (edict) declaring child marriage to be harmful as it is a large contributor to Indonesia’s high maternal mortality rate. Furthermore, they cited studies that many Indonesian child brides could not continue their studies once wed and half their marriages ended in divorce in addition to child marriage increasing the risks of exploitation, sexual violence, and domestic abuse.
Even so, stories about children getting married continued to take place and go viral on social media. Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Deputy Minister Lenny Rosalin said that child marriage in Indonesia is at “emergency levels” as, based on UNICEF data, Indonesia ranks seventh in the world and the second highest in Southeast Asia in terms of the overall percentage of marriages in which at least one of the spouses is under 18 years old. According to government census data, 17% of all Indonesian girls married in 2016 were under 18.
