When Amal was 15 years old, her best friend Jasmin stopped coming to school.
They were both freshmen at Fordson High School, in Dearborn, Michigan, home to America’s largest and most diverse Arab community. When Jasmin didn’t show up to their English-language learners (ELL) class that Wednesday, Amal assumed she was sick. But a day soon became a week, which quickly turned into a month. Amal tells me she suspected early on that Jasmin was not coming back.
“Her parents wanted her married,” Amal, who is Lebanese, says. “She was Yemeni—they always do that very young.” (Some names have been changed to protect privacy.)
Dearborn’s Yemeni population has grown significantly over the past five years, largely due to an influx of refugees fleeing the ongoing war in Yemen, according to a spokesperson for the City of Dearborn. More than one-third of Dearborn’s approximately 100,000 residents identify as Arab, and of those approximately 8 percent are Yemeni, which includes immigrants and Americans of Yemeni descent. Like most immigrant groups, the Yemeni bring their social customs with them.
Child marriage is one such norm, and its practice has affected Dearborn’s Yemeni girls for decades. On the south side of the city, where many Yemeni immigrants have settled, it’s impossible to know just how many girls like Jasmin drop out of school every year. As Danielle White, a teacher in an English as a second language (ESL) program told me, many of them “just go off the grid.” “They drop out of school. It’s like they’re under the radar here—nobody knows they exist. Sometimes they go to Yemen for the summer, get married over there, and when they come back, nobody knows they’re here,” she says.
Rola Bazzi-Gates, special education coordinator for Dearborn Public Schools, knows the Yemeni community well from her 14 years as a social worker, and says she often heard of girls between the ages of 15 and 17 marrying their first cousins, another Yemeni norm.
Liberal state laws in Michigan make such child marriages relatively easy to obtain. Michigan is one of 26 states that doesn’t have an age floor, meaning children can get married at any age if certain conditions are met. The state will legally recognize the marriage of a 16- or 17-year-old if the parents consent. If the child is 15 years old or younger, approval of the Wayne County probate court must be granted as well.
The need for court approval hasn’t slowed the rate of such child marriages. According to a 2017 Frontline report on child marriages in America, Michigan’s child marriage rate in 2010 was 20 per 10,000 marriages, higher than its neighboring state of Ohio, which had a rate of 12 per 10,000, but lower than rates in Kentucky (73) and West Virginia (63). Although child marriage rates have been steadily decreasing nationwide, Fraidy Reiss, founder of Unchained At Last, an advocacy group working to outlaw marriage before the age of 18, told Frontline it’s still staggering. “The number was so much higher than I had thought it would be,” she said.
Early marriages often result in Yemeni girls being pulled from the public school system, White says. Michigan’s relatively flexible homeschooling laws might be one reason these dropouts aren’t always flagged and investigated. Abigail Moore, a volunteer in Dearborn’s refugee centers, tells me that it’s common for Yemeni girls to leave the public school system for homeschooling when they reach adolescence. “The families will take them out of the schools and tell officials they’re homeschooling them, but basically they’re not getting any education after that,” Moore says.
And although parents are typically the driving force behind these early marriages, Bazzi-Gates doesn’t believe they do so to limit their daughters’ opportunities. On the contrary, “marrying young, it’s a tradition for the Yemeni,” she says. “It’s to preserve the family, to keep it. They feel secure that this is the right way to do it.”
As for the schools’ understanding of the practice of child marriage among the Yemeni, Dearborn’s superintendent Glenn Maleyko told me he isn’t “aware of it being a problem” and said he hasn’t seen statistical evidence proving it’s common. “I’ve heard of people telling me, ‘She should be in school, but she dropped out,’ and this and that. But I don’t have any data on that. It’s mostly just hearsay,” he says. “If someone were to drop out, we have intervention specialists who track them down. They’ll go to the homes and find them.”
Bazzi-Gates confirms this and says when she was a social worker in the Yemeni community she was often the person sent to do the tracking-down. “I used to talk to the parents about the importance of education, especially for a girl,” she says. But Danielle White and Abigail Moore both claim that despite the schools’ best efforts to prevent girls from dropping out, child marriage ends some girls’ educations. The Yemeni community has found ways around the system, White says, either by homeschooling the girls or sending them to Yemen to marry—which is perhaps why Superintendent Maleyko doesn’t frequently hear about girls like Jasmin.
On a rainy spring morning, I accompany Amal to the ESL class where she is a volunteer. She is 20 years old now and hasn’t seen Jasmin since she dropped out of Fordson. Amal imagines Jasmin with two or three kids, teaching them about exotic plants and animals—biology was Jasmin’s favorite subject. She wanted to be a scientist, Amal says.
Outside the building that houses the ESL class, a group of Yemeni women students are huddled together, the wind pelting rain at their backs, waiting to be let in for class. They range in age from 20 to 64, and while many of the women have only been in the United States for a year or two, Dirar, 42, tells me she has lived in Dearborn for 25 years. She just started learning English five months ago. When she first arrived with her husband, her “home and kids” took priority. She was 17 when she had her first child and says it was a “big job.” Now she has four boys and two girls, the youngest of whom is 17. “Now they are all grown and I can learn,” she says.
Hana, who is 20, is the youngest of the group and the one woman who attended school in Yemen. But six months into the school year there, her parents arranged her marriage to her first cousin. She says that her education ended then.
“When you’re married, everything stops. You can’t go to school. This happens to girls here, too. Some of their husbands want them to stay home and clean,” Hana tells me. She’s lived in Dearborn for three years but only began learning English four months ago, around the same time she divorced her husband. “I’ve always loved learning,” she says.
All the women I spoke to at the class were married before their 18th birthdays, and all of them believe that things must change for the next generation of Yemeni girls. Dirar does not want her daughters to repeat their mother’s experience. She remembers Yemen well enough to know the United States is one of the only places her girls will get the chance to better themselves. Her 17-year-old daughter will graduate high school next year, and Dirar says she encouraged her other daughter, now 19, to attend the University of Michigan-Dearborn. “She has been there one year,” Dirar tells me in broken English. “She wants to be an engineer.”
When I ask Dirar why neither of her daughters was married, she says, “They finish learning first.”
Like Dirar, the other Yemeni women tell me how thankful they are to live in a country—and city—that embraces their children and educates them. Each Dearborn school official I spoke to described this gratitude as a staple characteristic of the Yemeni community. They trust the school officials and are eager to work with them, says Bazzi-Gates.
“In all my years as a social worker in the Yemeni community, I never had an issue. I’m talking to you about thousands of families I dealt with, whether in their homes, the schools, in the community, or at events, they are always so appreciative,” she says.
The trust that exists between Yemeni families and the school district plays a key role in helping change traditional social norms in the community, albeit slowly, Bazzi-Gates says. As a social worker, Bazzi-Gates says she pushed parents to encourage their daughters, not just their sons, to attend college. “I would tell them, ‘She needs to be educated, not just married and raising a family, so she can depend on herself financially instead of waiting on a man and his money.’ ” And the families are listening.
“I’ve worked in different schools in Dearborn for more than 24 years. And before it used to be common for a girl to go to middle school, maybe high school, and only a few of them would go to college. But now, for the last 10 years, I see more and more of them pursuing higher education, and I keep encouraging them to go to college,” Bazzi-Gates says.
Iman Ismail, the head of Edsel Ford High School’s bilingual department, says when she first started in Dearborn’s school district 12 years ago, it was common for school officials to call Yemeni parents to find out where their daughters were and why they were not in class. But now, Ismail says, there are open lines of communication between the schools and the families. If a student is not in class, school officials typically know why.
But there are still exceptions. Amal says it took a week for her teacher to ask the class whether they’d seen Jasmin. It’s unlikely her teacher attributed Jasmin’s absence to an early marriage because, as Danielle White notes, “These things are kept pretty quiet.”
Ismail says stories like Jasmin’s are increasingly less common, though, because of the bridge Dearborn’s schools have built into the Yemeni community. Today, she says, Yemeni parents support the teachers and school officials completely because they recognize that the desire unifying parents and educators is to do what’s best for the girls.
“If the teacher tells them, ‘This is the right way to help your female,’ they’re very open,” Ismail says. “When we call them, they respond and say, ‘Oh, please, how do we help her?’ ” And continued education is almost always the school’s answer. Dearborn’s schools respect the Yemeni culture, Ismail told me, but that won’t stop school officials like Bazzi-Gates from speaking against norms that limit girls’ educations.
The Dearborn school district’s approach to its immigrant communities has made it a leader among cities. I sat in on a presentation given to Slovenian officials who were visiting Fordson High School, hoping to learn from its program how to better assist their own refugee populations. Fordson hosts several such groups each year, principal Heyam Alcodray says.
Fordson’s success is clear: Alcodray says that despite the fact that a majority of Fordson’s students are considered economically disadvantaged, the school boasts a 95 percent graduation rate. She says this eagerness to excel is especially evident in Fordson’s ELL classes. “The kids in these classes are excellent. The teachers love teaching them because every one of them wants to learn. They’re very, very motivated,” she says.
Edsel Ford High School students are also excelling. Among Dearborn’s three public high schools, Edsel Ford has the largest Yemeni population. This has created its own set of challenges, since many Yemenis have faced indescribable trauma, Ismail says. But despite this, her students are determined to prevail. She leads me down the hallway toward the school’s bilingual classrooms, past an inner courtyard that is home to 12 peacocks, which she notes have been with Edsel Ford nearly as long as the Yemenis. She has been especially proud of the progress made by her female Yemeni students.
“Girls in Yemen don’t have as much opportunity,” she says. “But the girls are very competitive now. They want to compete with the boys. They are the ones showing the biggest signs of improvement in academic learning.”
When Loukia Sarroub, author of All American Yemeni Girls: Being Muslim in a Public School, was in Dearborn conducting fieldwork, she says she was struck by the drive of the young women. Now a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Sarroub says that in the late 1990s, she knew of only two Yemeni women who were in college. In 2002, she knew of 22. Since then, the number has grown consistently.
Ismail agrees, noting that 10 to 12 years ago, Yemeni girls didn’t think about attending graduate school. Now, she says, the majority of students in the local university’s teacher education graduate program are Yemeni females—and many are married with children.
Child marriage in the Yemeni community will never disappear entirely. When I spoke to Yemeni women in the ESL class, Faizan, 53, told me all three of her daughters were married in Dearborn before they turned 13 years old; her youngest was 11 years old when Faizan and her husband arranged her marriage. Faizan tells me she would not do anything differently because that is what she did and that is what her granddaughters will do. “She is a girl, so she is a wife,” she says.
And as Amal reminds me, there will be others like Jasmin who will never be able to become scientists, doctors, or teachers. Over dinner in her two-bedroom apartment, Amal’s mother, Lina, tells me she feels bad for Jasmin. “She is having children, but she is a child herself. And even if she didn’t like her husband, she can’t say no. Even if it’s not good for you, no choice,” she says.
“As a researcher, I spent a lot of time listening to young women tell me they did not want to be married,” Loukia Sarroub says. “It was too early for them. Many of them wanted to finish school. Many of them just didn’t want to be married, regardless of school. These women had children very early, but now I don’t see the same patterns of parenting. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be exceptions. That doesn’t mean the newcomers from Yemen won’t be marrying their daughters early. That’s still going to happen.”
There is, however, an unmistakably positive trajectory away from child marriages among Yemeni women in Dearborn, and education is the reason. When these young women marry and raise families, Sarroub says, she hopes many of them will raise their daughters to expect an education. “The generation of young women I was interviewing—now they have their own children—I don’t see that these children of the first-generation Americans will have the same lives that their moms did. I agree that in times past the women didn’t have a lot of choice,” she says. “But with each generation, there may be more options.”
Sarroub says that given the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and the opportunities for education and acculturation for Yemeni refugees in this country, America should welcome and support these families. But President Donald Trump’s current immigration policies reflect a different sentiment. Trump’s restriction on travel from a handful of Muslim-majority countries, including Yemen, prevents Yemeni women and girls like the ones I met in Dearborn from coming to the United States. A challenge to Trump’s travel ban is currently before the Supreme Court, with a decision expected this summer.
These opportunities don’t only benefit the young. Many older Yemeni women attend ESL classes like the ones I observed, and many of them told me they eventually want to become U.S. citizens. Others simply want to be able to communicate with their neighbors, teachers, and doctors. A growing number of married Yemeni women are enrolled in GED programs as well. It’s also encouraging, as Ismail tells me, that many of these women receive support from their husbands in their efforts. Nine of the 10 Yemeni women I spoke to told me their husbands supported their decision to learn English.
This wasn’t the case for Hana, the 20-year-old I met at the ESL class who divorced her husband so she could “finally learn.” But that hasn’t prevented her from pursuing an education. Hana practices writing words in English, decorating the pages of a notebook with the phrase “Let your dreams set sail” on its cover. She says when she started learning English four months ago, she didn’t know what those words meant. Now she does.
She tells me she wants to travel to New York City and stand in Times Square, and she wants to help her 2-year-old son “become a great man.” Eventually, Hana wants to become a teacher so she can give other Yemeni girls the opportunities she found through education.
She smiles and says, “I’m free now.”
