‘I don’t have a future, full stop’ – a generation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon has been lost to child marriages and labour

It was one of the hardest decisions of Shams’s life: marrying off her 16-year-old daughter to someone double her age, so the girl didn’t starve. A year later and the Syrian refugee is facing the same predicament with her younger daughter. Shams, 54, can’t feed her either, or send her to school.

The mother of eight said it goes against everything she believes in. Just before the war in Syria erupted in 2011 she allowed her 21-year-old daughter, who was in her third year of university, to get married on the condition that she was allowed to finish her studies. Education for her girls was everything.

“I have to push the younger ones into marriage because we couldn’t afford for them to be at home,” she said, her voice cracking, as she sat in her ramshackle tent in Arsal, Lebanon, near the border with Syria.

She told me her children have been in and out of school since they fled the Islamic State takeover in Syria and the war in 2014. But as Lebanon’s economy crashed, she had to pull them out of school completely and now cannot even afford to feed them. She gives her youngest, aged just five, potato sandwiches when she can. “I don’t have money for food, for education, for anything,” she added in despair.

The situation is so dire she is considering returning to Syria, an active war zone where the family face hunger and arrest too. She plans to sell her wedding ring – the only item of any worth she has left – to pay the smugglers.

This week I visited half a dozen refugee camps scattered throughout Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and Arsal districts speaking to those hardest hit by Lebanon’s unprecedented economic collapse. The World Bank says Lebanon’s crisis is among the worst collapses in the world in 150 years. The currency has lost nearly 95 per cent of its value in just a year. Food prices have more than quintupled.

According to the United Nations it has meant that “almost all” Syrian refugees in Lebanon now live under the extreme poverty line, which means surviving on just a dollar a day. A staggering 99 per cent do not have food or access to money to buy food.

Families like Shams’s are going hungry and resorting to extreme measures to survive. This is the devastating reality of an economic collapse and war: the loss of the younger generation.

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After a decade of war, child labour and marriage rates are soaring among Syrian refugees in countries like Lebanon and across the Middle East and north Africa region. It means, unless there is urgent international intervention, even if the fighting ends, even if peace returns, Syria will have lost its future, as its children are married off young, are working, and increasingly unable to go to school.

Making matters worse in Lebanon, which is home to an estimated million Syrian refugees, is the fact that the authorities have not enacted a law against child marriage, despite years of campaigning by activists.

The UN children’s agency, Unicef, said six years ago that 6 per cent of Lebanese women aged between 20 and 24 were married before turning 18, but that figure rises to 40 per cent among Syrian refugees of the same age. That is thought to be far higher these days as the recent economic crisis has ravaged households.

It is part of a larger worrying regional and worldwide trend exacerbated by the arrival of the pandemic: Unicef said in March that an additional 10 million girls were at risk of child marriage around the world due to the impact of Covid-19 on education and economies.

According to Save the Children, women in the Middle East and north Africa are particularly vulnerable to this trend. Nearly 40 million married women and girls in the region were wed in childhood – a number which is only going to rise as the pandemic grinds on into another summer and girls are at greater risk of being forced or sold into “tourist” or “pleasure” marriages.

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Child labour is also on the rise among the Syrian refugee population. According to Save the Children, unofficial figures estimate around 18,000 young Syrian refugees in Lebanon are engaged in child labour, preventing them from accessing education. The charity group said that children as young as five are working. In December, Unicef warned that the number of Syrian refugee children aged between five and 17 who were working had almost doubled from 2019 to 4.4 per cent in 2020. That rate may double again.

In reality in the camps, it means virtually all the children and young people I spoke to this week were not studying but instead having to help their parents out by working or by marrying young. “I haven’t been to school since I was 10 years old, I had to work to help my family,” said Khalid, now aged 20, from inside his parent’s tent in the Beqaa Valley. “I work as a stone worker every day – and used to earn $10 a day but it’s now the equivalent of just $2.”

He said the main reason he works now is food, but despite his sacrifices, the family is still going hungry. “I don’t have a future here, I don’t have a future in Syria,” he added, looking at his hands. “I don’t have a future, full stop.”