One in Three a Child Marriage in Turkey
M Yolcu / MM
The AKP government has come under fire for its policies towards women over the past few months, and details continue to come in of the detrimental effects of these policies towards the situation of the country’s population of young women. One particular recent incident has been used by opposition figures to illustrate the direction the government is taking. While on the one hand the government preaches democracy with its new reforms package, one of which clears the way for women to enter public offices including schools and universities wearing the headscarf, on the other hand we find the General Vice President of the party, Hüseyin Çelik, influencing a television channel to sack a female presenter for dressing “too revealingly.” The AKP’s version of democracy, then, is obviously not open to everybody, particularly if one is a woman.
Another series of reforms implemented by the AKP, also trumpeted as “democratic,” are their educational reforms, most recently seen with the 2013-2013 educational reform known as the “4+4+4” educational system. This separated the total school career into primary, middle and high school, each of which lasts four years. These educational reforms have come under criticism for introducing compulsory religious education in school, and for greatly increasing the number of İmam Hatip religious schools in Turkey, both of which the secular opposition claim are evidence of a push to introduce a religious ideology in the education of the country’s youth. Perhaps most worrying, though, is the fact that the 4+4+4 system allows for children to drop out of school if they get married, instead continuing with distance learning, thus opening the door to a rise in the number of child brides in Turkey and a corresponding rise in the number of young women who leave school. Now more details of these new developments and their effects on young Turkish girls have been clearly revealed by research from Gaziantep University.
According to information from Dr Erhan Tunç, an assistant professor in Gaziantep University, one in three marriages in Turkey involves at least one party under 18 years old. His research also puts forward that 82% of child brides in Turkey are illiterate. His colleague, assistant professor Sevilay Şahin, added the information that in the last three years 134,629 girls under 18 got married. The number of under-16 girls whose family applied to courts to marry in the last year alone reached 20,000.
These statistics are probably not helpful for Prime Minister Erdoğan, who claimed during a recent policy workshop on education for girls that the 4+4+4 reform was designed to increase the proportion of girls in education, and that this reform was the fruit of an 11-year struggle.
Dr Erhan Tunç, appearing on a panel about “child marriages and child rights” organised by the Ministry of Family and Social Policy for the International Day of the Girl Child, said that child marriage occurred, according to his research, as a result of lack of education and warped religious views. Tunç added that the official statistics on child marriage do not in fact reflect the real situation, saying, “The official legal age for marriage is accepted to be 18 and over. Marriages which occur under that age are not officially recorded. Because of this, the statistics which come out do not reflect the truth. In fact, in Turkey one in three people is facing marriage under the age of 18.”
Dr Tunç’s research, which encompassed the Turkish regions of Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Batman, İzmir, Muğla and Manisa, reached some striking results. Alongside the bleak literacy rate of just 18% for child brides in Turkey, according to Tunç, “This research found that the proportion of marriages with a participant under 16 years old is around 40%. In the centre of Şanlıurfa this rises to 60%. In İzmir, [Turkey’s third most populous city, a developed metropolis in the West of Turkey], the proportion of married girls under 16 is 17%. Taken generally around Turkey this means that one in three marriages is a child marriage, in fact 37%.”
Dr Sevilay Şahin’s research adds further depth to the figures revealed by Dr Tunç’s research. Şahin points out that Interior Ministry figures pinpoint the number of girls under 18 who married over the past three years at 134,629, while last year 20,000 families applied to courts for permission for their under-16 year old daughters to get married. The figures of males marrying at similar ages present a startling contrast - twenty times more girls under 18 have married than boys of the same age group. Dr Şahim characterises this situation as a “terrible, bleeding wound” for her country. The sheer number of child brides of adult men makes this evaluation very difficult to argue with.