In Turkey, the legal age for marriage is 18, although 17-year-olds can marry with parental consent, and 16-year-olds may do so with court approval under exceptional circumstances.
As a native of Turkey in the 1990s, I witnessed some early marriages in my childhood, even though they felt foreign to me. The women in my family married in their twenties. Neither my mother, my two aunts, nor my two grandmothers experienced early marriage. I always believed this was because they came from well-educated, modern families.
My grandmothers were born in the first decade of the Turkish Republic, while my mother and my two aunts were born in the 1950s.
My paternal grandmother, Kadriye Göksel, was born in Istanbul in 1926 into a Western-oriented family. Her father, a mechanical engineer, had gone to Germany in the early 1900s, during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, to complete his studies. He encouraged my grandmother to pursue her education, and she became a primary school teacher. She married my grandfather, Süleyman Göksel, a civil engineer, in 1946 at the age of 20. Their marriage was a love story rather than an arranged one. They met in a café in Istanbul, fell in love, and got married.
My maternal grandmother, Ülkü Karateke, was born in 1932 in Develi, a small town near Kayseri in central Turkey. Unlike my paternal grandmother, she grew up in the heart of Anatolia. Her education was limited to the one primary school in her town. Her marriage was arranged, and although she was 20, she was deeply unhappy about it. She cried and resisted, but her family forced her to marry. She never met or spoke to her husband until the evening of the wedding.
This contrast in their stories shows how much the region and the family you are born into can determine the fate of a girl in the Middle East. My mother, a pharmacist, married my father at 25, while both my paternal and maternal aunts also married in their twenties. In their cases, the choice of whether and when to marry was left to them.
My first encounters with early marriages
One day in 1992, my family and I were invited to a wedding. It was our neighbour’s son’s wedding. The family had moved from a small Anatolian village to the city of Kayseri. I was ten years old at the time. The wedding took place in their home, and I remember dancing to Arabic songs from the popular Mezdeke album, which was often played at weddings in Turkey.
The bride was brought from their village. The guests began to shout: “The bride is here! The bride is here!” As a ten-year-old girl, I was curious to see what she looked like and what she was wearing. But when I saw her, I felt both fear and astonishment — the bride was only 14 years old. She was so small that they placed her on a chair so people could see her. My mother was the only one who reacted, saying: “She is still a teenager who hasn’t even finished growing.” Nobody else seemed to notice.
Another memory is from 1995, when we attended the wedding of our servant’s daughter, Hülya. Her family had emigrated to Kayseri from eastern Turkey. Hülya and I were almost the same age — I was born in 1982, and she was a year older. I remember the first day we played together as children. A year later, her family stopped her from going to school, and within two or three years, they married her off to a boy only slightly older than her.
At her wedding, she wore a white dress but seemed unaware of what was happening. For her, it was just another game. She was only 14. A year later she became pregnant and suffered health problems during her pregnancy.
The decision to marry was not theirs
In interviews I conducted with six women who married in their teenage years during the 1990s, all said the decision was made by their families. None were asked whether they wanted to marry.
Fatma, now 53, married at 15. She was betrothed at 13 and recalled coming home from school one day to be told by her family that she was to be married. She protested, cried, and begged, but her objections were ignored. “I was not ready for the responsibilities that come with marriage and being a housewife,” she told me.
Gül, who married at 14 in the mid-1990s, shared a similar story. Her father initially objected to the proposal, saying she was too young, but her future husband’s family insisted: “She can grow up in our family as our bride.” When they visited for the traditional kız isteme (marriage proposal ceremony), Gül was told to make coffee for the guests. Only later did she realise she had unknowingly prepared coffee for her own engagement.
Going or not going to school
For many of the women I interviewed, education was cut short. Şerife, married at 15 to a man ten years older, had wanted to become a doctor. But her family withdrew her from school after primary education, believing her beauty made her vulnerable.
Hatice, who married at 15, remembered her father telling her at the age of ten: “Girls don’t go to school.” She too was taken out of school after primary education and married off soon after.
In Turkey during the 1990s, I often encountered this mindset. Some families, particularly in rural areas, believed education threatened a girl’s honour and dignity, or feared that it would lead to independence — something they did not want for their daughters. For them, marriage was security.
My own family strongly opposed this idea, and I remember both my maternal and paternal grandparents encouraging others to send their daughters to school.
Pregnancy and reproductive challenges
In my interviews, I found that three women became pregnant immediately after their weddings, while two struggled with infertility.
What astonished me most was that when I asked if they had suffered psychological or physical harm from marrying before 18, they all said no. Even when I asked directly about sexual intercourse under 18, they said no.
Fatma, Gül, and Hatice all became mothers within their first year of marriage. In contrast, Şerife waited ten years before conceiving, undergoing hormone therapy before eventually giving birth at 25.
Ayşe, who married her cousin at 15, experienced two miscarriages in the early years of her marriage and waited seven years before she became pregnant again.
