MEETING WITH INSTITUTIONS States have the greatest responsibility in preventing child marriage, protecting children from this destructive ‘tradition’, keeping them in education, and ensuring that they grow up in health and safety and with dignity. Child marriage is a subject of international human rights law and protective/preventive/supportive policies are the responsibility of governments and governmental organisations. This is a constitutional obligation. In this process, the ‘elected’ as well as the ‘appointed’, i.e. local administrations, play a major role. The face-to-face interviews we conducted with institutions in Adana in parallel with the field research we conducted in Adana were to remind both official institutions and municipalities of this obligation and to create an agenda that child marriage should be a non-negligible topic of social policies in the city. These interviews had another purpose: To underline that child marriage is not only a matter of child marriage, but also a social problem that needs to be addressed in a wide range of areas from urban rights to education, from agricultural production to health, from poverty to domestic violence, and that needs inter-institutional coordination. However, during our interviews with institutions, we did not come across any upto-date, inclusive, city-wide research on child, early and forced marriages, which are widespread in Adana as in every city in the country. There was no work on the agenda of official institutions to combat this problem. The lack of an effective and sustainable children's policy that addresses child abuse and other crimes against children within the framework of international norms has a major role in this. The fact that the existing studies have been initiated and carried out with the efforts of civil society organisations is an evidence that the obligations of the social state have been undertaken by the actors of the civil sphere. We are ready to share the results of our field research, our field observations and the analysis of the data we have obtained with the relevant official institutions, local administrations and non-governmental organisations in Adana, and to join hands to create an effective chain of intervention to prevent child marriage and to protect the human rights of girls. 61