In Georgia, every seventh woman marries before turning 18 and at least two underage girls become mothers each day. Georgian human rights defenders, armed with the latest studies on child marriages, say that these figures fail to shed light on the real, much bigger picture because accurate statistics on the practice are unavailable due to the high number of under-reported cases.
Child marriages flourished in Georgia following the end of the Soviet Union against a backdrop of military conflicts, socio-economic instability, mass unemployment and food shortages in the country.
To try and tackle the scourge, in 2017 the state outlawed the registration of marriages involving minors under the age 18; this was previously permissible with parental consent and briefly after that, with the court’s permission from the age of 16.
However, despite this progressive amendment, the practice has persisted in other forms such as informal unions and underage engagements, which affect girls disproportionately.
In fact, reports to Georgia’s Public Defender’s Office on underage engagement cases have spiked. Nino Iakobidze from the Office’s gender equality department believes that the increased number of notifications could be the outcome of invigorated discussions about the predicament of underage engagements and an increase in public awareness on the harmful effects of the practice.
When considered from a gender perspective, however, the trend suggests that engagements imperil girls specifically, not only because they are more often pressured into such relations due to social expectations but also because “unlike boys, girls have fewer chances to opt out of these arrangements. As a result, they fall under a higher risk of forced marriages,” stresses Iakobidze.
Bella, 24, comes from a small, ethnic Azerbaijani village in Georgia’s eastern Kakheti region. She got engaged right after she graduated from secondary school. Although she had just turned 18 at the time, her family’s plans to marry her off began well before she came of age. The shocking news came to Bella unexpectedly, when she was about to move to the capital city of Tbilisi to prepare for university entry exams and study journalism.
“I found out about my engagement when guests came to our house with a red wedding ring box. It was placed on top of a tray of sweets. When I saw the box, I turned to my mum in the hope that she would reject the proposal, but the agreement was made. The moment I knew it, I burst into tears of frustration,” she recalls.
Because Bella would have had to live on her own to attend university, far away from her community, her parents felt that they had to hasten the engagement to protect her honour: “They believed that if I was left unsupervised in the city, I would get myself into an undesirable situation, so, they sealed the deal hurriedly. I was too timid to resist but also unwilling to complicate things for my family,” explains Bella, shaking her head regretfully.
It took her three tearful attempts, in addition to several months of conflict with her controlling fiancée, before she convinced her parents to break off the engagement.
“Each time, my entire extended family would try to persuade me not to interrupt the arrangement. They succeeded the first two times but finally, I managed to end it.”
Deprived of opportunities
Since that time, Bella has been practicing journalism and speaking at trainings sessions about child marriages in Georgia’s ethnic minority communities where, she says, people have found ways to avoid having their unions flagged up as ‘underage’.
“Some married girls don’t give birth until they turn 18, therefore no underage motherhood cases are registered in the hospitals. Others interrupt their secondary school education for the sake of marriages but keep schools unaware about the real reason for leaving,” says Bella.
According to a 2017 study by Georgia’s National Center for Disease Control and Public Health, 98 per cent of girls who get married before 18 do not pursue higher education.
In Georgia, child marriages are perceived to be prevalent in ethnic minority and rural communities, but recent investigations show that they are common across the country, irrespective of ethnic backgrounds and geographical location, reflecting the country’s much broader trends of gender inequality and socio-economic challenges.
“Child marriages are represented in ethnically Georgian and minority communities equally, albeit with differences in characteristics and causes. If, in the former group, the average age of marriage is 16-17, among ethnic minorities [engagements] can take place as early as at 13,” says Natia Gvritishvili, a project coordinator at Union Sapari, an NGO that advocates to end child marriage.
“We get fewer requests of assistance from ethnic Georgians because with them, forced engagements [unlike in other ethnic communities] do not take place,” explains Gvritishvili.
Apart from patriarchal cultural norms, another driver of child marriage is poverty and subsequent limited opportunities for socio-economically vulnerable youth in Georgia, especially in the peripheries of the country.
In 2016, the rate of unemployment for 20 to 24-year-olds was as much as 30 per cent, and there are few possibilities for personal development, thus pushing many young Georgians to opt for early marriage as a viable solution to economic deprivation. Girls in such circumstances suffer more.
The gender and age-disaggregated data available from Georgia’s National Statistics Office’ shows that throughout the country, the number of 16 to 19-year-old girls who were married in 2015 outnumbered boys by five-to-one.
“In rural and mountainous areas especially, where poverty is the most problematic issue, people find ways to survive by entering in underage marital relations. Those children who marry willfully, do this because they want to escape hardship,” says Ana Abashidze, chairperson of the Tbilisi-based NGO Partnership for Human Rights.
“Therefore, unless the problem is met with an adequate social policy from the state, punitive measures alone for those who seek relief would be unjust,” she adds.
To tackle all forms of child marriage practices in Georgia, Partnership for Human Rights is calling on the state to ensure the development of comprehensive prevention measures, alongside proper enforcement and most importantly, recognition of the problem as a means of coercive control over women.
“Although the legal amendment was a right and necessary step forward, it hasn’t changed the bigger picture,” says Abashidze.
“Child marriage, being one of the origins of gender inequalities, destroys people’s, and especially girls’, prospects in life, which is why politicians should campaign and communicate openly that this practice is the beginning of women’s social control, that it deprives people of opportunities, and increases the risk of abuse. Unless the problem is tackled at the level of policy and politics, the elimination of child marriage will be difficult in Georgia,” she concludes.
