Marriageable girls: how do underage brides live in Georgia

No one knows exactly how many underage girls are married off in Georgia. According to the UN Population Fund, at least 17% of girls in Georgia marry before the age of 18, the legal age of marriage. But the data is difficult to account for, as families often circumvent the law by not registering a marriage officially for several years. They hold weddings in local churches or mosques and consider the couple to be married in a cultural and religious sense.

Photojournalist Daro Sulakauri grew up in Georgia and remembers one of her classmates getting married when they were both 12 years old. 

These feelings returned to Daro when she began to study women's issues in Georgia, receiving a grant from the Human Rights House Network. Remembering her classmate, she started asking people about teenage marriages. Soon after, the photographer received an invitation to a wedding in a small village. At the end of the celebration, the young bride began to cry.

UNICEF calls child marriage a fundamental violation of human rights. Georgia has one of the highest rates of child marriage in Europe. This is a tradition that is many centuries old, and it is not associated with a particular religion. The reasons for marriage differ depending on the place and social group, but there are common features. Grooms are almost always older, have already graduated from high school, and have reached the age of legal marriage.

Typically, the groom's mother begins the matchmaking process, but Sulakauri has encountered couples who met through friends, at school, or online. Girls are not necessarily forced into marriage, but the pressure of tradition is very strong.

The people in the pictures of Sulakauri are Georgian Azerbaijanis, an ethnic and religious minority. One of the girl brides that the photographer met was Leila, who was 12 years old when she got married and began to live in her husband's family. Her story especially shocked Sulakauri. The photographer recalls that in the first conversations Leila was very frank. 

A year later, Sulakauri contacted Leila again, and everything changed. 

In the lives of these girls will leave an imprint not only unfinished school. There is literally no sexual education in Georgia, and Sulakauri says that some girls don't understand what marriage entails until the day of the wedding. 

A 2010 study of the reproductive health of the population found that 76.6% of married girls aged 15 to 19 do not use any of the modern methods of contraception. It is not surprising that many young brides become pregnant soon after the wedding, which leads to various complications and deterioration of the health of their still developing organisms.

When Sulakauri meets these girls, she constantly recalls her childhood.