School attendance campaign uncovers scandal of young pupils being taken away to be married. Jon Gorvett reports

The discovery that 100 girls aged 11 to 13 have been taken out of three schools in a single Aegean town to be married off by their families has exposed a scandal in Turkish education.

It will also reinforce concerns raised by the Home Secretary David Blunkett about forced marriages among immigrants in Britain.

After reports that some 168 pupils had failed to turn up for class at the start of year in the three schools in Incirliova, 50 miles south of Izmir, authorities involved in a government drive to improve school attendance launched an investigation.

“We had started to pay attention to the school records of each pupil - and that’s how this came to light,” said Incirliova governor Kamil Koten.

They found that 68 of the non-attendees were boys who were being kept out of school by their parents to work, and 100 were girls who had been married off.

“Some of them are now pregnant and some of them have got children,” Mr Koten said.

That this case has emerged in the more westernised Aegean region, rather than in the east - where there is a stronger tradition of child marriages - has shocked Turkey’s secular establishment.

But most teachers think the case is merely the tip of an iceberg. They point out that until 1998, when schooling was only compulsory for five years, the Incirliova case would have gone unnoticed.

“When education was five years, some of those who have graduated at the age of 11 got married,” Mr Koten said. “This fact had been ignored and had not come out. But with eight years’ education compulsory, the number of pupils not attending attracted attention.”

Recent changes to Turkey’s civil code, made under EU pressure, will give wives legal equality within marriage and raise the minimum age for matrimony from 14 to 18.

But the child marriages are being carried out by local imams according to Islamic law, which is not recognised by Turkey’s secular authorities. This also means the weddings are not registered by the state.

Fatmar Basar, a lawyer at the Istanbul Children’s Rights Centre, said that regarding the Incirliova children, “court cases can be opened over abduction, rape, parental abuse, breaking the marriage laws and the selling of children for money”.

Allegedly, and in keeping with old marriage traditions, the bride’s family receives “head money” of between pound;750 and pound;1,000 for each girl they marry off.

Mr Koten said the state prosecutor has opened cases against 25 families, while medical tests are being carried out on the girls to establish if there is a case for statutory rape. Marrying under age carries a prison sentence of four to seven years. Parents can be jailed for three-and-a-half years.

Women teachers and groups have reacted strongly over the case. “This is clearly a great injustice,” said Nurten Ozkor, a spokeswoman for the Women’s Secretariat of the teachers’ union Egitim Sen. “It’s a very widespread practice too, particularly in rural areas and even in Istanbul. It’s about many things, but one of them is ignorance.”

The case highlights the difficulty of implementing new social legislation, currently being passed by parliament, to bring Turkey into line with the EU - which Ankara desperately wants to join.

“Even if the girls had not been sold off into marriage,” said Beyhan Demir of the women’s magazine Pazartesi,“what chance do you think they would have of going anywhere once they’d finished their education? In these very patriarchal families, they would still end up washing their husband’s feet.”