PEREGRAF- Ghamgin Muhammad
One year into her marriage, twenty-five-year-old Harme hadn’t yet slept with her man who she says was addicted to porn and refused to sleep with her.
"My husband was addicted to porn websites. I waited for a whole year and talked to him about it, his only response was he apologizes and that it was out of his hands, that he could not give it up and enjoy having sex with me - I was his wife," Harme told PEREGRAF.
Harme added she had more than once asked her husband to visit a therapist, but he refused, which led to an inevitable break-up. Understanding her situation, Harme’s family agreed to their divorce after she demanded it.
According to unofficial data from the Kurdistan Regional Government, half of the Region's population are internet users, while global - including porn - websites are easy to access to anyone of any age and with any basic knowledge of typing.
Men and women who are addicted to porn visit therapists and ask for instructions to give up the habit, "some say they had family problems because of it," a therapist who preferred to stay anonymous said.
This is a problem among the married and the unmarried. The therapist added that some of the clients who are addicted to watching porn are afraid of getting married.
Hannah, mother of two from Sulaimaniyah, says her husband cannot sleep with her without watching porn - a habit she said started before their marriage, and that they are constantly “at war” in the bedroom.
"I regret not breaking up with him the first night of marriage when I saw this behavior, I spent eight years of my marriage at war, it made me feel like I was not enough, even though I always take care of myself," Hannah said.
"When I say you are doing something wrong, and I have my needs as well, he makes fun of me. Whenever he is using his phone, I feel like he is watching porn sites, it always makes me worried and suspicious," added Hannah.
In the Kurdistan Region, more than 50 internet lines are available. Only one among those companies with a family modem has censored the porn websites. The Ministry of Transport and Communication does not oblige companies to censor the websites that have a negative effect on society when giving them permission and signing contracts.
"The duty of monitoring and censoring is the government’s, not the internet companies, because it needs a big budget," said Karwan Raza, head of the postal and courier services in the Kurdistan Region.
He also stressed that unless there is a government resolution, no company will be able to do that.
According to a law on violence against family in the Region, not meeting your partner’s sexual rights is punishable by three to six months of imprisonment, as well as a fine between five to ten million Iraqi dinars.
Reconciliation committees in the Kurdistan Regional courts to reconcile the spouses who have filed for divorce, say there are a variety of reasons why couples get divorced, one them being demanding the partner to repeat sex movements they see on the porn videos.
"When we get into the details of the problems, it becomes clear that watching porn sites or forced intercourse is a problem between spouses," Shokhan Ahmed, a lawyer in Sulaimaniyah said.
"Some women are complaining that their husbands don’t need them anymore because of the porn websites,” she added.
In 2015, a number of parties of the Kurdistan Parliament, particularly the Islamic parties, signed a bill and handed it over to the parliamentary leadership to block porn sites, but there were no results.
"There are many issues that are taboo, and everything you say is dangerous so that it’s not normalized among people, or if we talk about it, we will be criticized and told by the people that we are busy with minor things like this, while there are all these crises," said Gulistan Said, deputy chair of the Social Affairs, Protection of Women Rights, and Human Rights Committee in the Kurdistan Region Parliament.
The Union of Muslim Scholars in the Kurdistan Region made several attempts to block or filter those websites until the end of 2019 through the Ministry of Transport and Communication or the parliament, but to no avail.
The Kurdistan Region's efforts came after the Iraqi parliament approved a bill in September 2015 to block porn websites through the government with pressure from the Islamic parties.
Muthana Amin, an MP from the Iraqi parliament said its lack of implementation is because it was only a bill and it didn’t become a law. The government has the authority to implement or not, and the Ministry of Transportation and Communication couldn’t be forced to block the porn websites, he said.
Social workers and family specialists say that because the world has become a small place and there are hundreds of programs to crack the filters, that is why the censorship of porn sites will not succeed. These issues can only be solved through enough education and awareness that individuals understand on their own and stay away from things that are harmful to society.
This coincides with a voice of dissent in society that considers blocking porn sites as a violation of individual rights.
*Names have been changed to maintain confidentiality.