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SYRIA/JORDAN - SEEKING STABILITY FORDAUGHTERS, SYRIAN REFUGEES IN JORDAN
PUSH EARLY MARRIAGES
MAFRAQ, Jordan — The bride-to-be was so young and shy, she spent her
engagement party cloaked in a hooded robe that swallowed her slim figure but
could not quite hide the ruffled pink dress her fiancé’s family had rented for
her.
Rahaf
Yousef, 13, a Syrian refugee from Dara’a, at her family’s home in the Zaatari
camp in
As the Syrian women celebrating her coming
wedding to an 18-year-old cousin chattered around her in the Zaatari refugee
camp, she squirreled herself in a corner, perking up only when a photo or
message from a friend popped up on her cellphone. The girl, Rahaf Yousef, is
13.
Speaking wistfully of her days at school,
she declared herself throughout the day to be “indifferent” to the marriage she
says will keep her from finishing her education. But no one seemed to be
listening.
For many
Syrians stuck in Jordan’s squalid and sometimes dangerous refugee camps,
marrying girls off at younger and younger ages is increasingly being seen as a
necessity — a way of easing the financial burden on families with little or no
income and allaying fears of rape and sexual harassment in makeshift living
spaces where it is harder to enforce the rule of law. As a result, Unicef says,
the number of marriages involving girls younger than 18 has ballooned since the
war in
But the trend — even among displaced
Syrians who live outside the camps — is increasingly worrying international aid
groups and women’s advocates who say that the Syrians are simply trading
immediate dangers for longer-term ones. They tick off a laundry list of threats
for women worldwide that accompany marrying before they are 18.
High on the list, they say, are increased
risks of being the victims of domestic violence and an abrupt end to the young
women’s education. The aid workers also worry about pregnancies among girls
whose age makes them more vulnerable to certain life-threatening complications
like eclampsia, which is characterized by seizures.
During the first six months of this year, 32 percent of all registered
marriages of Syrian refugees in
A majority of the Syrian girls marry into
Jordanian families, Unicef reported, ensuring themselves a place in
Although the marriage of girls as young as
13 is not unheard-of in parts of the Middle East, including rural Syria, that
practice has not been common in areas of Syria or Jordan with higher levels of
education. Jordanian law allows marriages for girls and boys 15 to 18 years
old, but it requires that a chief justice of a Shariah, or Islamic, court
determine that all sides agree to the match.
In an attempt
to ensure the same level of scrutiny for Syrian marriages, the Jordanian
government — which has struggled to accommodate more than 600,000 of the more
than three million Syrians who have fled their country — has opened a Shariah
court in the Zaatari camp. But the minister of social development, Reem Abu
Hassan, said that it was difficult for judges to say no to early marriages
given the circumstances — and difficult to ensure even that all the marriages
were registered.
“We have to be practical and see the
challenges the Syrians are facing,” she said.
Human rights advocates say many of the
women arrived in
Even in urban areas outside the crowded
camps, many women who are widowed or without their husbands, who stayed in
Outour al Khasara, 45, a refugee who lives
on a farm near the Zaatari camp, said she saw firsthand that counting on
marriage as protection against such threats might be illusory.
She married
off her 15-year-old daughter, Jazia al Barhoum, last year to a distant cousin
to protect her from “the uncertainty that continues to plague our future.”
Twenty days into the marriage, Jazia said,
her husband began to beat her. Jazia quickly left him, but returned at the
request of her husband’s family members. “He promised my family he would treat
me well,” she said, “but he didn’t change.” Eventually her father decided the
marriage should end and went to bring her home.
Sitting on plastic buckets covered with threadbare
pillows one recent day, Jazia’s parents expressed regret about their decision
to have their daughter marry so young.
Her father, Abu Muhsen al Barhoum, said
unemployment, idleness and fear were pushing Syrian refugees to marry too
quickly and that he had lost count of the people he knew who had recently
married and separated.
Jazia declares herself much happier to be
home working in the fields. “You should live your life and then get married,”
she said. “I guess this is the lesson my family learned.”
Another teenager, Yasmeen Ritaj, 16, described a
similar experience, of initially being wooed, but then being beaten by her new
husband. “I imagined it would be paradise,” she said, “but the first time he
beat me, I knew there was no future and that this was hell.” A month after the
wedding, she became pregnant and then returned to her family after just eight
months of marriage, before her daughter was born.
Aid agencies and organizations are alarmed enough
by the increase in early marriages that they have been conducting awareness
campaigns.
“You’ll be surprised at the lack of
knowledge among the community about the devastating health consequences of
early marriage,” said Fasel Shammout, a psychologist who has done training for
the refugees. “By the time they reach us, they are in a dire state — legally,
mentally, physically.”
Even among those who end up in loving marriages,
the risks can be severe. Hana Mohammad, 16, was married in Syria during the war
to a young man who professed his love, but whom she would have married later
had the fighting not given her few good choices. Her parents, who remained in
Syria, thought she would be safer living with his family, which was planning to
leave the country, than staying in Dara’a, where so many missiles fell on the
wedding day the families held no party.
By the time the husband’s family left Syria, she
was eight months pregnant. Soon after they arrived at the Zaatari camp, she
collapsed. “She turned blue, she became stiff as stone, she was having seizures
and there was blood coming out of her mouth,” said her husband, Mohammad
Ghazawi, 26, who said he had known he wanted to marry her since catching
glimpses of her in their hometown.
It is unclear whether the arduous 12-day journey
through the desert caused her collapse and the coma that followed, but teenage
mothers are considered at risk for the condition she eventually learned she
had: eclampsia.
In the end, doctors were able to deliver her baby,
a girl, safely, but Hana continues to have seizures.
Although she is still a believer in early
marriages, her anxious husband and her mother-in-law have begun warning other
girls to wait until they are past 18.
“I almost lost my wife,” said Mr. Ghazawi. “She
paid the price for being pregnant too early in her life.”
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