By Mohamed Sabry
CAIRO
Sitting at her doorstep, Saffia, 18, recalls how she used to run and play in the open fields with her friends. But she can't do this anymore now.
"I'm a mother of a two-year old boy now," Saffia told Anadolu Agency.
Like many of her likes in Upper Egypt, the 18-year-old girl was married at the age of 15 to an older man, as parents opt to marry off their daughters at an early age according to local traditions.
"Girls who reach 16 without getting married are seen as spinster who had passed the age of marriage," said Saffia, who was born in Minya province.
Saffia is not the only girl in her family who married at an early age. Her two older sisters were also married off at 15.
There are no official estimates of early marriages in Egypt since many families, particularly in rural areas, tend not to document the matrimony.
However, unofficial estimates put the figure at 15 percent in urban areas. The number jumps to nearly 35 percent in rural areas.
In an effort to discourage early marriages, Egyptian authorities enacted a law in 2008 that raised the legal age of marriage to 18, but the trend remains high.
Azza Suleiman, director of the Egyptian Center for Women's Issues, blamed insecurity for the rising rates of early marriages in Egypt.
"The trend has been on the rise since 2012 as many families went on to marry off their young daughters after hearing reports about the abduction and rape of girls following the revolution," Suleiman told Anadolu Agency.
Egypt has been dogged by four years of political turmoil since a popular uprising in 2011 swept autocratic President Hosni Mubarak from power.
"The insecurity has forced many girls to drop out of school and their families married them off a few months later," Suleiman said.
- Poverty
The women's rights advocate also cited poverty as among the main factors for the troubling phenomenon in the Arab world's most populous state.
"Poverty has driven many parents to put their daughters into marriage at an early age," Suleiman said.
According to the World Bank, more than a quarter of Egypt's 88 million people live below the poverty line.
Suleiman warned that early marriage often result in early divorce.
"Many girls, who were married off at an early age, were divorced in the first [few] years of their marriage," she said.
More than 70,000 cases of divorce were reported in Egypt in 2013, according to the National Center for Social Research.
The center found that almost 49 percent of newly-wed couples divorced within the first two years.
Suleiman called on Egyptian authorities to shoulder their responsibility of preventing the marriage of girls under 18.
"We need to have the state play its role, reform the education process and address poverty to help prevent the early marriage of girls," she said, going on to call for changing the media and religious discourse to address the issue.
"While the media still portray women as a commodity, we have scholars who say that women were created only to please men," Suleiman said. "This discourse must be changed."
