Marriageable girls: how do underage brides live in Georgia

No one knows exactly how many underage girls get married in Georgia. According to the UN Population Fund, at least 17% of girls in Georgia get married before the age of 18, the legal age of marriage. But the data is difficult to take into account, because 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.

Source: National Geographic

A 17-year-old Georgian Azerbaijani bride living in Kakheti is waiting for the groom's arrival on the wedding day. She met her future husband, who is 22 years old, a month before, when their engagement was announced.

Photojournalist Daro Sulakauri grew up in Georgia and remembers how one of her classmates got married when they were both 12 years old. "I had some mixed feelings. It seemed to me that something was wrong. But I didn't understand what was going on," she says. These feelings returned to Daro when she began to study women's issues in Georgia, having received a grant from the human rights network Human Rights House Network. Remembering about 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.

The bride's classmates came to praise her dress.

"It was very difficult to guess her feelings," recalls Daro Sulakauri. — Was she sad? Was she glad? To me, she was confused. That's why I started to realize that I really want to tell a story about it."

In the village living room, the bride is preparing for the wedding.

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 has been around for many centuries, and it is not connected with a particular religion. The reasons for marriages differ depending on the place and social group, but there are common features. Grooms are almost always older, have already graduated from school and have reached the age of legal marriage.

The bride applies makeup before the wedding.

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

The 17-year-old bride leaves her home.

"It's like they're going with the flow. Because their great-grandmother did it, and their grandmother and mother got married at a very young age. Therefore, they believe that this is the way of life, that it should be so," says the photographer.

Teenage boys look out of car windows at wedding celebrations.

The people in Sulakauri's pictures are Georgian Azerbaijanis, an ethnic and religious minority. One of the girl brides whom the photographer met was Leila, she 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. "She had these dreams about the future, about who she wanted to become, for example, a stylist. She wanted to continue her studies and do a bunch of things."

Friends and relatives dance around the bride, and she receives gifts in the form of money and cries.

A year later, Sulakauri contacted Leila again, and everything changed. "She became a housewife at the age of 13. She's not going to go to school, that's for sure. In a sense, this topic is closed to her," says the photographer.

The bride and groom step over a slaughtered ram as part of a wedding ceremony.

In the lives of these girls, not only unfinished school will leave an imprint. Sexual education in Georgia literally does not exist, and Sulakauri says that some girls do not understand what marriage entails until the very day of the wedding. A study of the reproductive health of the population in 2010 showed that 76.6% of married girls aged 15 to 19 years do not use any of the modern methods of contraception. It is not surprising that many young brides get pregnant soon after the wedding, which leads to various complications and deterioration of the health of their still developing organisms.

A couple of Muslim newlyweds from the Azerbaijani diaspora pose in front of a mosque on their wedding day.

When Sulakauri meets these girls, she constantly recalls her childhood. "It was completely different. I was a child for as long as I could, you know?" If her work cannot give such a childhood to the brides in her pictures, the photographer hopes that she will be able to change the future of other girls. "I wanted to show people in my country that this is happening. This can push for change. Perhaps they will start talking about it: "Maybe it shouldn't be like this. Maybe it's too early.""

A Georgian family from Adjara lives in this house in the summer, which is common among local peasants. Usually such houses are more than a hundred years old. The cattle are kept on the ground floor, and the family sleeps on the second floor.

15-year-old Marie lives in Adjara. Most of her peers drop out of school and get married. Her grandmother believes that this is a tradition that needs to be passed down from generation to generation.

An Adjarian family travels from one village to another. Daro Sulakauri wanted to capture not only the weddings themselves, but also the way of life in these places.

Children swim in a green lake in Adjara.

Children at the entrance to the Adjara village. Early marriages are very common in this region.

Sali is 13 years old. Although she is not married yet, her grandmother told the photographer that she sees nothing wrong with early marriages.

Twins Monica and Laura live in Kakheti. They were born when their mother was only 14 years old.

Children ride a rope on a foggy day. For many locals, childhood ends quickly due to early marriages.

14-year-old Tamro from Adjara dances at her sister's engagement party. Although it is normal to get married among her peers, Tamro wants to finish school first.

Women and girls took a break during the engagement celebration.

Adjara is famous for its mountainous landscapes and, unfortunately, a large number of marriages among minors.