Early forced marriage, which affects a third of girls in 42 countries, or about 39,000 girls and women every day, is assumed to be a cultural thing. It happens far away from us, in countries that we’ll never visit, can’t place on a map and to people who don’t know any better. That’s wrong, though, as these stunning, bewildering images drawn by Syrian girls living as refugees in Zaatari camp in Lebanon show. The girls who feature in the images, put together by Save The Children, have experience of early forced marriage – either they’ve been sold by their parents to older men to be married, or they know girls who have – and have drawn their interpretation of forced marriage. And it’s anything but supportive of a practice which sees girls as young as five married to men who can be decades older than them.
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Pictures: Rosie Thompson/Save the Children
Save The Children
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In three years of Syrian conflict, 1 million people have fled the country. Where child marriage existed before the conflict, it was at 13 per cent, but within the Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon, it’s almost doubled to 25 per cent.
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The practice of early forced marriage sees girls as young as five married to men who can be decades older than them. The increase of this is in part down to parents wanting to ‘protect’ their daughters from sexual harassment.
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The bizarre logic goes that if girls are married they will be less susceptible to sexual harassment and abuse that could leave a stain on their family’s ‘honour’. A girl can be forced to marry her rapist to retain family ‘honour.’
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A girl under 15 is five times more likely than an adult woman to die in childbirth. Girls who marry before 18 are more likely to experience domestic violence than their peers who marry later. They’re also more likely to drop out of school.
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Suggested solutions to this problem are education for girls, economic incentives to ensure they're not married off to ease costs, teaching older community members that child marriage is wrong and to lobby authorities to implement laws against it.
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This caption reads: ‘Daddy, where is this man taking me? Is it to the park?’
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.