Nuriye Kadan, a board member of the İzmir Bar Association and prominent Turkish women’s rights advocate says that at least one third of marriages in Turkey involve underage girls.
Citing figures from Turkey’s Population and Health Research at a conference convened to address the problem, she said “there are 181,036 child brides in our country,” adding that the actual figure is probably far higher because many child marriages are performed only in the presence of an imam, and are not officially registered.
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Kadan said that about 97.4 percent of Turkish high-school dropouts who list marriage as the reason for stopping their education are girls. Problems resulting from early pregnancies are among the top reasons for the mortality of girls between the ages of 15 and 19.
Kadan defined child marriages as “a major violation of children’s rights.”
Opening the conference, former State Minister Işılay Saygın said “We must all share the burden of responsibility to fight child marriages. We must wage a comprehensive campaign to create awareness on this.”