The “Adam and Eve” matchmaking platform openly facilitates child marriage with institutional support, exposing a systemic legal vacuum and the regime’s role in normalizing the exploitation of children.
The Iranian matchmaking website known as “Adam and Eve” has created a direct pathway for child marriage in the country, allowing children as young as thirteen to be registered as marriage candidates.
Although the platform brands itself as a facilitator of marriage, evidence from its registration system shows that anyone born in 2010 or 2012 can be entered as a potential spouse without any restrictions or verification of age or identity.
This structure enables parents to create full marriage profiles for their underage children. Much of this registration activity originates from deprived regions where early marriage reflects not only entrenched cultural norms but the deeper crisis of poverty, inequality, and the absence of legal protection for minors.
Child rights experts and social workers describe this situation as a direct result of a legal vacuum that has allowed the regime to institutionalize child marriage under official cover.
Despite public criticism of early marriage, the platform’s executive director openly insists that the company is legally obligated to accept members who fall within the age thresholds defined by Iranian law.
These thresholds, enshrined in the Civil Code and reinforced by the Youth Population Law, set the minimum marriage age at thirteen for girls and fifteen for boys, a framework that has long been exploited to justify underage unions.
An experimental registration conducted by a journalist confirmed that creating a marriage profile for a thirteen-year-old girl involves no barriers, demonstrating the complete absence of safeguards, oversight, or identity checks.
Data patterns show that most underage registrations come from marginalized areas, mirroring national statistics in which tens of thousands of marriages under the age of eighteen are recorded each year. Girls appear most frequently between thirteen and sixteen, while boys cluster around sixteen to eighteen. This reflects the larger national trend in which girls are pushed into marriage considerably earlier, often losing access to education, emotional development, and autonomy.
The platform’s registration questionnaire focuses heavily on religious adherence, political orientation, gender conduct, and lifestyle choices, framing a narrowly ideological template of acceptable marriage while omitting any questions about personal consent, mental readiness, or psychological maturity.
The platform boasts an Instagram account with over 180,000 followers and claims to operate “with official permission.” State-backed media, including IRIB channels such as TV2, TV3, and Ofogh, have repeatedly promoted the website without once addressing the severe dangers of underage marriage.
Official records show more than twenty thousand marriages involving minors annually, with deprived provinces such as Sistan and Baluchestan, South Khorasan, and Kerman holding the highest rates—precisely the regions where many underage users of this platform originate.
Experts warn that early marriage routinely leads to severe physical, psychological, and social harm. Recent cases involving the death of teenage brides, including a sixteen-year-old killed by her husband and another minor who died from violent injuries inflicted by a twenty-seven-year-old spouse, illustrate the deadly consequences of this legalized exploitation.
Such incidents represent only a fraction of the violence linked to child marriage. In practice, the absence of oversight and the reliance on parental consent or court-issued “maturity” rulings create fertile conditions for sexual exploitation and domestic abuse.
The platform is not a private independent entity. It is one of the subsidiaries of the “Imam Reza Society,” which identifies itself as a marriage facilitator and claims more than a decade of activity.
Its listed supporters and partners include the International Imam Reza Society, the National Family Foundation, Khorasan Science and Technology Park, Sharif University of Technology, Imam Reza International University, and the Imam Reza Foundation. This extensive network demonstrates that child marriage is not occurring on the fringes but is reinforced by institutions operating with the regime’s approval.
In response to public outrage, the platform’s executive director confirmed that twenty-six profiles belong to candidates aged thirteen to fifteen, asserting that the system conducts psychological evaluations and identity checks and that parents must complete the forms for younger candidates.
He argued that “age alone does not determine readiness for marriage” and described cases in which fifteen-year-olds were deemed suitable for marriage by the platform’s psychologists.
Even the customer support staff stated unequivocally that registering a thirteen-year-old poses “no problem” and insisted the platform merely introduces candidates, leaving all responsibility for safety, due diligence, and mental health checks to families.
Legal experts stress that Iran is the only country without a fixed minimum marriage age. Although the law nominally restricts marriage under thirteen for girls and under fifteen for boys, parental consent and a court ruling can override these limits entirely.
Efforts by women’s rights advocates to raise the minimum marriage age were blocked in parliament, where lawmakers labeled such proposals “un-Islamic” and “a security threat.” According to child rights lawyers, this loophole has led to widespread abuse, particularly in impoverished regions where early marriage is often indistinguishable from forced labor, trafficking, or sexual exploitation.
Specialists insist that children under eighteen lack the neurological, emotional, and social maturity necessary for marriage or parenthood. Many teenage mothers later struggle with parenting, decision-making, emotional regulation, and household autonomy, perpetuating cycles of poverty, violence, and deprivation.
Despite these realities, underage marriage continues to be framed by the regime as a demographic and ideological objective rather than a human rights emergency.
The case of the “Adam and Eve” platform reveals a disturbing truth: child marriage in Iran is not an isolated cultural practice but a system enabled, protected, and amplified by official institutions.
With legal loopholes, state-affiliated sponsorships, and a regulatory system that prioritizes ideology over children’s safety, the infrastructure supporting child marriage remains firmly intact.
Experts warn that without legislative reform and the recognition of eighteen as the minimum marriage age, the regime will continue to sacrifice its children’s futures to a network of policies designed to normalize and perpetuate their exploitation.
