This book provides a comprehensive account of one significantly underreported aspect of
violence affecting young refugee girls today that of forced child marriage. It examines the
ongoing insidious practice via the lens of international human rights laws and contextualising
human rights laws and discourses in relation to Middle Eastern Islamic and Jordanian
understandings of international law and human rights where the practice in directly impacting
young Syrian refugee girls who are seeking refuge in Jordan with their displaced families. The
book finds that in a juxtaposition of human rights definitions and obligations between the
traditional and modern the religious and the secular there are mixed implications for the
realisation of universal human rights and that this has consequences for the most
vulnerable-child refugees. As a result Syrian children exist in a precarious situation. They
are living in a foreign state with an unclear legal status are largely unidentified and in
effect stateless. It is in this liminal space that Syrian children are vulnerable and
voiceless and highly exposed to forced marriages and the resultant violence and possibly death.
While allowed to continue the practice of child marriage not only severely impedes upon
progressive international human rights efforts to eliminate gender-based violence slavery and
discrimination but significantly impacts on children's physical mental and emotional health
and their opportunities for growth and development in society. As a case study this book seeks
to inform how vulnerable Syrian children have come to be increasingly confronted by child
marriage and to consider why it occurred and continues to occur even though the idea of
children being forcibly marriage is considered ethically and legally objectionable within
international human rights law.
