Forced marriages of Syrian girls in Lebanon to overcome economic hardship

Neila Zubur fiddles with a gleaming gold bracelet and with each question she shyly readjusts the veil over her forehead.

The ring she wears is part of the dowry that she just received at the age of 14 after being married by her family in an informal settlement for Syrian refugees in the Lebanese town of Arsal, on the border with Syria.

The collapse of the Lebanese economy is wreaking havoc on the most vulnerable population, such as those fleeing a war that has lasted for a decade.

Driven by need, more and more Syrian families are arranging a marriage for their youngest daughters in order to reduce the number of mouths to feed.

One day at the beginning of the year and suddenly, the young Syrian Miri, 20, showed up at the family store and asked for her hand.

Zubur's father consulted her and she nodded without ever having seen the fiancé's face or exchanged a single word with him.

“

Nassib

”, the young woman settles the question by resorting to the term used in Arabic to refer to what is destined in life.

At her young age, life has already taken its toll on her: she was five years old when the Syrian war broke out in 2011. She was seven when the family fled their hometown in Qalamun, a region in western Syria, to seek refuge in the neighboring Lebanon.

And 11 when the resurgence of fighting between jihadists of the Islamic State (ISIS) and Lebanese soldiers forced his family to flee again, this time within Lebanon to settle in the Wafaa al Outhman camp in Arsal.

"We exchanged several photos and messages on WhatsApp for a month and then we got married," says Zubur before his mother-in-law, Wafaa Al Qadi, 57, monopolizes the conversation with the teenager.

"My son works in the stone quarry and they have moved into a shop alone," says the woman.

The Arsal quarries are the main source of work in this town.

Three euros are paid per day.

In the last year, half of the 4.5 million Lebanese have fallen below the poverty line.

As for Syrians, nine out of 10 barely survive in extreme poverty, according to data from the UN, which registers 865,000 refugees.

For its part, the Lebanese government increases the number of Syrians in its territory to more than 1.5 million.

And if there is one Syrian for every three Lebanese in the country, in Arsal there are more welcomed than the local population, with some 65,000 Syrians compared to 35,000 Lebanese.

The value of the Lebanese pound against the dollar has plummeted 80% in the last 15 months, drastically reducing the purchasing power of refugees (and the rest of the population).

In addition, the family aid they receive from the UN has gone from 143 to 40 euros per month.

Reducing the expenses in the training of their children has been one of the mechanisms that refugee families have resorted to to face the shortage;

Another avenue has been minor marriages.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has recorded an increase in child marriages since the beginning of the pandemic among the Syrian population.

In areas such as Beirut or Mount Lebanon, where about 207,000 refugees live, the increase is 6% since the third quarter of 2020, said Lisa Abou Khaled, spokeswoman for the organization in Lebanon, in a telephone conversation.

In impoverished and congested Arsal, the numbers of child marriages are higher.

"The number of underage marriages has increased between 30% and 35% since the pandemic began," estimates Ziad Abou Hoch, president of the NGO Urda Spain, in Beirut.

Present in this town for a decade, Urda has carried out a recent sample of 2,000 marriages that concludes that 21% have been celebrated with a minor.

They are links that can be legally registered in Lebanon.

In the country there are 18 official confessions that govern personal status issues in their own codes and recognize the marriage of minors from the age of 14.

Two of those codes, Muslims, stipulate at nine the minimum age for girls to be married with parental authorization.

Other confessions place it at 14.

Lebanese organizations for the defense of women's rights such as Kafa (“Enough”, in Arabic) have been fighting for more than a decade against the law that protects the marriage of minors, although the proposal “remains in the drawers of Parliament and not on the agenda, ”said organization co-founder Zoya Rouhana in an email.

Along the way, they have won important battles such as the abolition in 2017 of article 522 of the Lebanese Penal Code, whereby a rapist of a woman, even if she was a minor, could escape jail if he married his victim.

Stolen childhoods

Back at Neila Zubur's store, the mother-in-law explains her choice: “My son wanted to get married and my brother-in-law assured us that she was a good girl.

Furthermore, daughters-in-law at 14 are more docile and easier to educate than at 18 ”.

The nuptials seem to suit all parties involved: the mother-in-law, the young man who wanted to get married, and the bride's parents who could no longer cope with the needs of five children.

"Parents today marry their daughters at an earlier age, 13 or 14 years old, compared to 2019, when the average age was between 16 and 17," says the UNHCR spokesperson.

Younger and more and more, but weddings for minors are not a novelty.

“They stole my youth from me.

When I was 14 years old, they married me to a 31-year-old man. I just wanted to go outside to play with my friends, but they told me no, that I was already a woman because I was pregnant, "says Syrian Turfa Nasser, who She has given birth to nine children before she turned 35. Three young people have already paraded through her Arsal store to ask for the hand of her eldest daughter, Ghada, 18 years old.

Nasser flatly refuses to marry until the young woman is able "to decide for herself what she wants out of life."

The hardest thing to cope with in her case, she says, was that her opinion was never taken into account because everyone, from her mother-in-law to her father, to her husband, decided for her.

Also when her husband married a second wife.

Today he assures that he will not allow his daughter to suffer the same fate.

Social customs have been maintained in exile.

Nasser regrets not having had a choice, but Zubur sees positive that he founded his own home at age 14.

Although it is as a refugee and in the standard 16 square meters measured by the flimsy tents in which the guests live: tarps that cover the irons, several mattresses on a carpet, a stove and a hole that simultaneously serves as a toilet and shower.

"I have not been married for four months and I am three months pregnant," says 16-year-old Najua Hussein al Hussein proudly in another informal settlement in Arsal.

Her 19-year-old sister-in-law Shazaa Ali Amar looks away uncomfortably: she has not yet conceived in her three years of marriage, something frowned upon socially.

As is customary, both of them left the paternal store to move closer to the husband's family.

Unlike the previous generation, in these more recent early marriages there is less age difference with the husbands, who are usually in their twenties.

“If you are a good wife, keep your house clean and your food ready when your husband comes home from work, the man won't feel the need to look for another woman,” says Al Hussein.

Like his sister-in-law, he dropped out of school at 14, but unlike Amar, he doesn't want to hear about going back to school.

“My husband cannot read or write;

That is why I would like to continue studying and thus be able to help our future children with their homework, ”Amar defends himself.

Faced with the refusal of her husband, the young woman has given up.

Fewer children in school

The UN points to marriage and child labor as causes for the decline in the number of Syrian refugees in school.

Only 13% of young Syrians between the ages of 17 and 24 receive some kind of training, while 66% of children between the ages of 5 and 17 attend primary education, according to statistics from UNHCR, the agency's refugee agency. .

“There are no universities or vocational training centers here like there were in Syria, where they are also free;

so young people get married earlier, ”says Jamal al Zohari, a 50-year-old farmer from the Syrian region of Homs.

Marrying as a refugee is also cheaper in Lebanon than in Syria, where men have to buy a house before founding a family, while in the informal settlements of the neighboring country it is enough to be able to pay the eight euros per month that it costs to rent one shop in informal settlements. With the economy downhill, it is also increasingly common to see Syrian children rummaging through rubbish bins.

Child labor between the ages of 5 and 17 has gone from 2.6 to 4.4% in one year, according to UN data.