On 13 June 2011, Recep Tayyip Erdogan was re-elected Prime Minister of Turkey. His election manifesto 'Target 2023' promises the people a new constitution that supports democracy and freedoms, and that Turkey will, within ten years, become one of the top ten economies in the world. Four days prior to his election victory, he abolished the Ministry for Women and Family, leaving Turkish parliament with no specific department with an explicit focus on women's rights.

Meanwhile, in a small office in a leafy suburb of Ankara, women's rights organisation Ucan Supurge has been gathering intelligence about child marriages. They've spoken to women like forty year-old Hanife who, aged fifteen, was forced to marry a man twenty years her senior. "I don't have big dreams," she told them, "but I wish I knew how to read and write." They've met Zozan, who said "I was so young when I got married that I didn't even have any dreams."

They've discovered that one in five girls of the 1.5 million Romas living north-west of Istanbul is married by the time they turn 15. They've heard countless stories of girls who had dreams to study and become teachers and lawyers and police officers, but who are prematurely removed from school to become wives and mothers and slaves to their husband's families. "Everyone thinks this is an issue in east Turkey and the Kurdish area," says Selen Dogan, who coordinates the Child Brides project, "but that's not true. We've been to 54 different cities. This issue is everywhere."

Historically, precise statistics on Turkey's child brides have been scarce. Early marriages mostly take the form of an Imam Nikah – a religious ceremony that is unregistered and goes undetected by the state. But since 2008 a small team from Hacettepe University's Population Studies Unit has been working on the first ever national study of marriage practices.

Their findings, presented to the Grand National Assembly in January 2011, indicate that almost 40% of Turkish women between the ages of 15 and 49 were married by the time they turned 18. These figures are considerably higher than earlier estimates of the extent of the problem, and rank Turkey's child marriage rates alongside sub-Saharan African countries like Zambia and Tanzania, according to statistics published by the International Centre for Research on Women. "The Commission is planning on publishing that report," says Dr Mehmet Ali Eryurt of Hacettepe University, "but probably they will not do anything else."

To understand why this practice persists in a country striving towards European integration and with the world's 17th largest economy is to understand centuries of tradition that has infected the national psyche. Dr Nilufer Narli, Dean of Sociology at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University and an expert on the role of women in Turkish society, says that "when a girl turns from a child to a woman in the body, the family wants to marry them as soon as possible." She explains how even today Turkish girls are under the burden of honour and virginity – a constant pressure to protect the reputation of the family.

"Part of the problem in Turkey specifically is that early marriage is not seen as a problem," says Ms Dogan. And so, even though the legal marrying age is 18, communities turn a blind eye to the teenage girls throughout the country – particularly in poor and rural communities – who continue to be forced into underage religious marriages by their parents and relatives. Families continue to be able to exploit loopholes in the law which, for example, permit marriages from the age of 16 with court approval.

From violence and rape to maternal health issues, the problems associated with child marriage are well documented. Yet it appears the fundamental issue is that a girl's life is, in a sense, frozen in time when she becomes a child bride. She is taken out of school to become a labour force for her husband's family. She is deprived of her education and the opportunity to work or acquire skills - presenting a major obstacle for self-realisation. Those who have been married by a religious ceremony alone are particularly vulnerable, as under current Turkish law they can't access social services and have no right to property accumulated during marriage without a legal marriage certificate. "These girls become very poor when they are married," notes Ms Dogan. "They have no education. They can't get employed. They just sit at home."

It would be unfair to say that Turkey has not taken steps to improve the plight of women in recent years. There have been notable changes to the civil code, the penal code and the constitution - including a constitutional guarantee that "the family is the foundation of Turkish society and based on equality between the spouses."

But with 5.5 million Turkish women who are or were child brides, 27% female participation in the workforce, and millions more illiterate women than men, there is a clear disparity between official law and customary practices. Given that the Prime Minister Erdogan himself obtained a court order so that his son could marry 17 year old Reyyan Uzuner in 2003, it seems a near certainty that early marriage and its consequences will not feature highly on the national political agenda in the foreseeable future.

Which is why, as Ucan Supurge works its way around the country, meeting the human faces of the child brides problem, Ms Dogan has concluded that: "Education is the key to the problem door. It's not enough to change the laws because the laws cannot change the mentality of the people."

And clearly, it's not just a matter of educating the girls at risk of early marriage; but also the parents, families and friends who make early marriages socially acceptable, people like Yeliz, from Istanbul, who says "when I hear these true life stories I feel like it's happening in another country," as well as the government and judiciary, which ultimately bears the power and responsibility to implement and enforce the legal protections and freedoms that have been promised.



This feature was written for the Guardian International Development Journalism competition before 13 June 2011.