Underage girls enter partner cohabitation and marriage due to parental and community pressure, poverty, and lack of choice. Due to incomplete elementary and high school education, they cannot join the labor market, overnight they assume the role of wife and mother in a new family for which they are neither mentally, physically, nor emotionally ready, and they are prevented from achieving any kind of economic independence. The lack of education, traditional gender norms, poverty, and intersectional discrimination of Roma women, as women, as members of the Roma national minority and as members of the poorest social stratum, puts them in a position where they see marriage or partner cohabitation as the only way forward in their lives and a way out of insecurity, which turns out to be the wrong decision very quickly. The texts were created as part of a project to promote journalistic excellence led by the Agency for Electronic Media.
