The legal loophole making a million Egyptian child brides
As I was perched on a squeaking, swivelling barbershop chair in a little hamlet in Sharqiya, keeping still as the barber trimmed my beard, a familiar face looked back at me through the mottled mirror.
It was Mohamed Mahmoud, or Saffrouta as we used to teasingly call him on account of his slight build. Fourteen years after we had last seen each other, sharing the same sixth grade classroom at Al-Saadiya Azhar Primary Institute, I found myself barely recognizing my childhood friend.
It took him a while too.
He greeted me with a shy smile. “Yousef! You look completely different. You’ve put on weight!”
We started ruminating on our old classmates, listing one name after the other, trading tid-bits about where they are in the world now, all those years later. The conversation breezed, until I uttered a name that fell like a sheet of ice. “Mayada El-Sayed. Do you remember her?” A strange flicker crossed Mohamed’s face.
“She got married right after primary school. I remember her henna night like it was yesterday,” I said.
He fell silent for a moment. “Mayada is now married to my father,” he said in an unsettlingly calm voice.
I must have looked startled. “How?”
“She got divorced after her first marriage,” he simply said. “Then my father married her.”
An image immediately flashed across my mind. Mahmoud's father, a stocky volunteer army conscript, had always reminded me of another domineering figure—Shawish Atiya, the ever-frustrated sergeant from Ismail Yassin's old films. Mohamed's father had married Mayada a year after her divorce, at the age of 15. They went on to have two children.
Fourteen years earlier, as the dust clung to our clothes during our daily football matches on the street, we were interrupted by a nameless voice. “Tonight is Mayada’s henna party,” it bellowed. None of us had understood what marriage meant, and neither had Mayada.
That evening, we ran to her house in our grubby outfits and bare feet. Music blared, colorful lights strung across the courtyard. We pushed our way through the crowd. One of our classmates whispered mockingly, “My mom is inside with the neighbors. I heard they’re stuffing cloth and tissues around Mayada’s chest so she can fill out the dress.”
I didn’t grasp what that meant at the time. But the image of a little girl being fitted into a woman’s dress, her tiny frame padded with cloth to mimic adulthood, stayed with me.
The memory of Mayada’s marriage, and where she eventually ended up, pushed me to dig into the marriage and divorce bulletins published by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS).
I zeroed in on what is known as “uqud tasaduq/ratification contracts”, which is a belated official endorsement of earlier “urfi/unregistered customary marriages”. In such cases, families wait until a girl turns 18, the legal threshold, and then formally register a marriage that began years earlier. A legal loophole through which a grim reality comes to be.
I examined data from 2014 to 2024. And even within that window, the figures understate the scale of the phenomenon. Using conservative parameters, the numbers are staggering.
At least 911,000 girls were married off through this system in just 11 years—an average of 227 “Mayadas” every single day.
Shocking numbers
In December 2023, Counselor Mahmoud Fawzy, then-campaign manager for presidential candidate Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and current minister of parliamentary affairs, appeared on air with TV anchor Kaswaa El-Khelaly. When she asked why he seemed so moved while listing the president’s achievements in numbers, he paused, eyes brimming, and delivered the line that would soon go viral.
“The numbers are shocking.” Struggling for words, he added, “No one can… they just won’t find the words,” meaning that the figures spoke for themselves. In that performance, he was referring to El-Sisi's achievements since his rise to power.
These numbers were equally shocking.
We examined the legal loopholes that enabled the rights of at least 911,000 girls to be violated over eleven years. During the period examined, one in every ten new marriage contracts involved a child bride under 18.
In 2014 alone, there were 62,300 such cases. The figure peaked to 101,000 in 2017, before relatively declining to around 70,000 in 2024.
Although the figures point to an overall decline in child marriage after 2017 and then again in 2019, that drop masks a reality which manifests differently across the country's varying demographic compositions. In some governorates the practice has fallen dramatically, in others it continues to rise.
“Suez is our Sweden. You won’t find child marriage there,” said population studies researcher Akram Alfy, who notes he has “been investigating this issue for 25 years.” He attributes the fall in Cairo and much of the Nile Delta to higher levels of education.
But, Alfy added in his interview with Al Manassa that “Egypt’s demographic map has changed. Upper Egypt now accounts for 38% of the population. It also has 45% of the country’s teenagers. So even as the phenomenon shrinks overall, the share of the most underprivileged segment of society—rural Upper Egypt—is growing.”
Existing legislation and government strategies have failed to halt child marriage from persisting as a nationwide daily practice, rather than being prosecuted as a criminal offense.
In October 2022, the government submitted a draft bill to parliament, alongside three similar proposals from MPs. All four were blocked by lawmakers from pro-government parties, who insisted on postponing any discussion until Al-Azhar issued an opinion, arguing they needed religious backing to convince their constituents that child marriage is a crime.
Al-Azhar, however, denied ever receiving the bill. Three years later, the draft remains buried in parliament’s drawers.
Under Child Law 126 of 2008, marrying minors is prohibited, but the law imposes only administrative penalties on those who register such unions.
The government’s shelved bill, by contrast, would criminalize marrying off any boy or girl under eighteen. It proposes a minimum one-year prison term for anyone involved in arranging such a marriage—including parents—and fines ranging from 50,000 to 200,000 pounds (approximately $1,000 to $4,000).
How do they get away with it?
In our sixth grade classroom, the slim, dark-skinned girl sitting in the second-to-last desk was Mayada, and she once dreamed of becoming a nurse. But her father told her she would marry a man in his mid-thirties, not waiting for her to finish primary school.
“This is your groom, Mayada, your engagement is next week,” she recalled in an interview with Al Manassa. Mayada is now 28.
Her first marriage contract, issued at the age of 13, was a handwritten sheet of paper signed by her family and two neighbors as witnesses. The union was announced from the speakers atop a nearby mosque. No official registrar was involved, and nothing was formally recorded.
Although the law prohibits registering marriages for anyone under 18, it leaves wide loopholes that allow families to marry off their daughters informally, and later register the union on her eighteenth birthday with a ratification contract.
On her first wedding's night, Mayada’s mother whispered in her ears, “Let him do whatever he wants. Don’t say a word.”
“I didn’t understand anything,” Mayada said. “All I knew was that he was doing things that felt shameful, but my mother convinced me that this is what usually happens.”
Two years into the marriage, her husband divorced her verbally, claiming she could not bear children.
She returned to her father’s house, a 15-year-old “divorcée.” But now, her body no longer needed cloth to fill out a dress.
Less than a year later, a “good man,” as her family described him, appeared. That was reason enough for them to marry her off again, despite the fact that he was 55, that his daughter was only a year younger than his new bride, and that his son, Mohamed, had once shared a classroom with Mayada.
“I used to play with his son and suddenly his father became my husband. They told me, ‘This is your fate, and God wants you to be taken care of,’” Mayada recalled.
Mayada went on to have two children. She was thrust from childhood to become a wife, a divorcée, then a mother—all before her 16th birthday.
She remembers little of her second wedding except a strange, intimidating face, a rough hand gripping her own small hand, and her timid voice calling him “uncle.” Her children now call him “granddad,” just as his son’s children do.
Mayada is one of 60,000 Egyptian girls who had been married twice before turning 18 during the years from 2020 to 2024. During the same period, 116 girls lost their husbands early on in the marriage, thus officially recorded as “widows.” When their second marriages were retroactively registered, their faces still looked unmistakably like those of children.
Mayada is also part of a long line of girls married off to men many years, sometimes decades, older.
Data from 2014 to 2024 reveals striking age gaps, where 92 girls were married to men over 75, and around 1,250 to men over fifty.
We also identified 17,000 cases in which the husband himself was under eighteen, meaning both spouses were children shouldering responsibilities far beyond their emotional capacity.
The pattern extends to thousands of husbands in their forties and fifties. Under United Nations standards, many of these situations fall within the definition of human trafficking.
Some girls face circumstances even harsher than Mayada’s, having to endure daily abuse at the husbands' hands. In some cases the violence is fatal. Faten Zaki, a 14-year-old child bride with ink-dark eyes and a soft smile, was killed by her husband over a plate of pasta.
In Kafr Yacoub village in Gharbiya governorate, Faten sat down to eat after a long day of housework in the blistering August heat. When her husband, a young tuktuk driver, returned home and found she had eaten without waiting for him and his family, he exploded.
He beat her, burned her with an iron, struck her on the head with a heavy stick, then dragged her to the rooftop and threw her off.
Faten died a few hours after reaching the hospital. He was initially referred by the Tanta Criminal Court to the grand mufti—a procedural step that precedes death sentences in Egypt. But on October 13, 2025, the Tanta Appeals Court reduced his sentence to 7 years in prison.
Data from 2022 to 2024 show that 60,000 girls were married at ages 13 and 14, yet their unions were not formally registered until five years later.
For all those years, they lived as wives without documents and as mothers without legal recognition—until the day of ratification, when the law transforms a violated child into a legally acknowledged spouse.
Hotspots of abuse
Child marriages account for 70–80% of all ratification contracts in Egypt. Six governorates—Giza, Beheira, Dakahliya, Fayoum, Sharqiya, and Minya—make up roughly half of these cases, 83% of which occur in rural areas, according to our analysis of data from 2016 to 2024.
Although the numbers are declining in much of the country, most notably in Giza where ratification contracts fell by more than half, five governorates tell a different story.
In Beheira, Fayoum, Sharqiya, Damietta, and Alexandria, child marriage has risen again in the past two years.
Raw counts of child marriage can be deceiving. Absolute numbers tend to mislead because populations are vastly different across regions. Only when we analyze the marriage rate over the past four years does the scope of the crisis truly come into focus.
The sheer number of child marriages in Matrouh, North Sinai, and South Sinai remains relatively small. But their share of all marriages performed in those governorates is terrifyingly, tragically high.
In Matrouh, for instance, three out of every five marriages involve a girl under 18. In the coastal town of Sidi Barrani, the pattern is even more extreme: nine out of every ten.
In South Sinai, one in every two marriages involves a minor. In North Sinai, the figure is one in three. In the districts of Rafah and Nakhl, seven out of every ten.
In Taba district in South Sinai, the pattern is more extreme. Nearly all marriages seem to involve underage girls.
Researcher Akram Alfy places these areas outside standard analysis, arguing that they are “Bedouin governorates ruled by custom.” But the New Valley governorate—also largely Bedouin—defies the theory with rates less than 5% of all unions.
Further south along the Nile Valley, Fayoum records one child marriage for every four marriages. It is followed by Beheira, Beni Suef, Kafr El-Sheikh, and Qena where the rate is one in every five.
To identify the hotspots, we analyzed all ratification contracts by district between 2021 and 2024.
Atsa in Fayoum ranked first, with 9,303 contracts, followed by Kafr El-Dawar in Beheira with 8,096. El-Husseiniya in Sharqiya recorded 7,824, and Tamiya in Fayoum registered 6,950.
Samalout West in Minya came fifth with 6,497 contracts, followed by El-Wasta in Beni Suef with 6,276.
A story heavy on the heart
The stories often echo one another, but the case of Mayar Abdel Fattah(*) is especially unsettling.
Mayar was married at the age of 13 in a village in the El-Husseiniya district of Sharqiya governorate. One year later, while she was still pregnant, her husband died.
When she gave birth, she was unable to register the newborn in his father’s name.
An amicable meeting took place between the two families where they agreed that the baby should be registered under the paternal grandfather’s name.
But the uncles refused, fearing that the child would later claim inheritance.
After weeks of dispute, the newborn was registered under Mayar’s father’s name, making the boy legally his mother’s brother.
Mayar declined to speak to Al Manassa, but her mother, Amal, agreed.
Justify marrying off her daughter so young, she said “In our village, marrying early isn’t strange. No one objects. My daughter was mature and her body was ready.” Then, after a heavy pause, she added, “But if I’d known what would happen, I wouldn’t have married her off.”
However, we uncovered similarly bitter cases.
One involved a girl in Abu Kabir, also in Sharqiya, who married at 15 and soon gave birth. Because the marriage was unregistered, the baby could not be legally recorded in the parents’ names.
The family turned to what they believed would be a temporary workaround. The husband’s father registered the newborn as his own. Legally, the baby was now its grandparents' child.
They assumed it was merely a formality that could be corrected later. But three years on, when the girl turned 18 and the marriage was finally registered, the young mother insisted her husband “sets things right.”
Instead, she found herself trapped in a legal maze. Fraught with disputes, procedural hurdles, stacks of paperwork, and court cases that ended with the judge rejecting her request.
She remained the mother of a child who is, on paper, her husband’s brother.
Al Manassa tried to contact several official marriage registrars, but all denied ever registering child marriages and declined to comment.
However, we reached a man in his fifties from Abu Hammad district in Sharqiya, known as Sheikh Mamdouh(*). He is not an official registrar, but presents himself as a respected “social guarantor,” describing his role as “the head of a big family and something like a customary judge.”
Sheikh Mamdouh told Al Manassa that he drafts customary marriage contracts at families’ request.
“I guarantee the marriage. I take a financial pledge from the groom’s family,” he said, insisting that his “service” prevents disasters. “There isn’t a single girl I married off who didn’t officially register the marriage contract later,” he added.
He recounted the case of a girl in his own village, Alim, in Abu Hammad, who married without his involvement.
“She had a customary contract and got divorced while pregnant. Her family summoned her father-in-law. The guy [the husband] dug in his heels and refused. They couldn’t get anything out of him. Eventually, the child was registered in her father’s name instead.”
Mamdouh defends his role, “Religion doesn’t forbid this marriage.” He argues that child marriage exists “in many countries around the world,” and cites religious edicts by Salafi clerics, especially a fatwa by prominent Egyptian preacher Mostafa El-Adawy.
Why are they violated?
Al Manassa spoke with five families from North Sinai, Ismailia, and Sharqiya who had married off their underage daughters in the past six months.
In every interview, one word surfaced repeatedly: as-satr/protection.
Its meaning shifted subtly from one household to another. Only one family explicitly cited “lightening the financial burden” as their main motive.
Fatma Abdelazim, a woman in her forties from the village of Galbana in Qantara Sharq, Ismailia governorate, married off her three daughters while they were still minors.
“They left school after the ninth grade, and I married them off. I myself married at fourteen,” she said. She denied that poverty played a role. “We’re doing fine, thank God, but this is our custom. When a good match comes for a girl, why keep her at home?”
Aida Salem, a vendor in her forties working at a stand in the Abu Hammad Monday market in Sharqiya, echoed the common reasoning. For her, the pressure was rooted in something deeper: having a competitive edge.
“If we can afford her dowry, then my daughter should marry. The whole family talks about whose daughter married first. Why should their girls marry before mine?” she told Al Manassa.
When confronted with Mayar’s ordeal and the cases of children left without legal papers, she responded, “We’re not throwing our daughters under the bus. We take guarantees. There’s a men’s gathering. They make the groom sign a blank paper and a promissory note.”
As I started this investigation, I assumed child marriage was primarily linked to poverty. Researcher Akram Alfy defies that hypothesis outright.
“Not at all,” he said firmly. In his view, the main drivers are “custom and tradition,” especially in rural Upper Egypt and the border governorates.
Population expert Ayman Zohry agrees.
He argues that fluctuations in recorded child marriages over the past decade do not reflect a clear link to poverty. Instead, he sees the roots in a deeply entrenched “socially Salafi mindset” and a legal loophole that remains wide open.
“Society is still extremely Salafi, economically and socially. There are very important people, even intellectuals, who still believe the girl should stay at home so the boy can go to work,” he told Al Manassa.
A wasted economic force
The labor market does not favor women. Zohry explains that many young women look for jobs after graduation but find no decent opportunities or safe infrastructure. Over time, long-term unemployment turns them into what economists call “discouraged workers.”
Eventually they exit the labor market altogether and are no longer counted as unemployed, which lowers their apparent economic participation.
Of the 31 million people in Egypt’s labor force in the first quarter of 2024, 25.5 million (81.4%) were men, compared with just 5.8 million (18.6%) women, according to CAPMAS.
In other words, for every woman participating in the labor force, there are four men.
Figures from the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap Report for 2025 shed further light. Egypt ranks 140th out of 148 countries in economic participation and opportunity for women.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights notes that while the state continues to loudly tout its commitments and “achievements” on women’s empowerment, all the statistical indicators and reports by international partner institutions, as well as the daily reality women face, point to a deepening crisis year after year.
Alfy adds that education, or rather the point at which girls drop out, is another key factor. “Education often stops at preparatory school or the start of technical secondary school. Look at the share of girls in general secondary education in some governorates. Look at the situation in small localities,” he said.
A field study of 383 families published by Assiut University in 2019 examined why families marry off their daughters under the legal age.
The leading reason was “protecting the girl because her match has come” at 40.2%, followed by “ignorance of the consequences” and “old customs” at 17.5%, and “the girl’s lack of education” at 16.4%, alongside other economic and social motives.
Data from 2021 to 2024 show a strong link between education levels and child marriage. The overwhelming majority of cases occur among girls with low or mid-level education.
Girls with intermediate certificates, especially technical diplomas, top the list with more than 100,000 cases. Illiterate girls come second with 50,000, followed by girls who completed only preperatory education with around 40,000 cases.
We reached out to the National Council for Women, the official body charged with protecting the nation’s women and girls. After hearing my questions, the staff asked me to send my name and the full list of queries via WhatsApp, followed by a link to Al Manassa's website. I did.
Despite repeated calls and messages over two weeks, and waiting a third, their silence remained absolute until this investigation went into publishing.
I closed my laptop and stepped away from the data, but “Saffrota’s” faint voice lingered in my head, “Mayada is now my stepmother.”
(*) A pseudonym based on the interviewee's request.