STEPHANIE: I focused for years on the harmful repercussions of child marriage-perhaps the obvious starting point, visually, for this type of story. If that’s not inspiration enough to set someone on a mission, I don’t know what is.īECKY: How do you continue to decide which countries you want to highlight and whose stories you want to tell? This leads to huge variations in the practice, so it makes sense that a simple handful of photographs couldn’t possibly suffice to explain an issue as pervasive and nuanced as this. The numbers are staggering! At least 39,000 girls married every day-that’s one girl every two seconds! Every day that goes by, an incomprehensible number of girls’ lives have been forever changed.įrom a photographic perspective, it’s also important to note that the issue manifests itself differently in each country. Then you take the experiences of the relative handful of girls and survivors I’ve met and then realize … with child marriage occurring in more than 50 countries worldwide, how many more girls are living a similar hell, day in and day out. These heroic women live their lives just like anyone else, but if they’re comfortable enough to discuss their past with you, the toll taken by such an intense childhood trauma becomes very, very clear. The trauma these girls carry with them into adulthood is utterly palpable when speaking with child marriage survivors about their experiences. The more I pursued the phenomenon, the more the issue continued to unravel before me. STEPHANIE: Every girl I met, in each country, completely broke my heart-particularly the ones married to much older men. Unauthorized use is prohibited.īECKY: When did you realize that documenting child marriage would go far beyond a single photo story-that it would turn into a mission? The horror of learning otherwise is really where the Too Young to Wed project began. Naïvely, I’d assumed those kinds of things no longer occurred in the world. They told me they’d been married at 9, 10, 11-and in their misery had preferred death over the lives they were living. After some investigation, it became apparent that one of the things propelling these girls to commit such a drastic act was having been forced to marry as a child. I was horrified to learn that several girls in one province had set themselves on fire. STEPHANIE SINCLAIR: I first encountered child marriage in Afghanistan in 2003. I wondered how Stephanie has sustained her coverage for so long-if she’s kept up with the girls she’s photographed, who she surrounds herself with, how the issue has evolved, and if she ever needs to take a break.īECKY HARLAN: When was your first brush with the reality of child marriage? Her work on the topic was featured in the 2011 National Geographic magazine story “ Too Young to Wed” (which is also the name of the nonprofit she founded in 2012 that advocates to end the practice). Photographer Stephanie Sinclair has been photographing the issue of child marriage for 13 years.
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