In her long-term photo project, “I AM BEAUTIFUL BUT MY DESTINY…” she documents the impact of child marriage on young Syrian girls displaced in Turkey, photographing them mostly in the city of Kayseri, in central Anatolia, but also in Gaziantep, close to the Syrian border.
Over the years, Sebzeci grew close with many of her subjects, especially two who grew up without fathers and met in Turkey. One was born in 2006, the other in 2002, and they happened to both be called Fatma. The youngest Fatma, now 20, has three young children aged 1, 3 and 5 years old, after marrying at 15.
For Sebzeci, this was a topic that she found taboo, though the more time she spent with these communities, the more she heard stories of Syrian girls aged between 13 and 17 marrying Syrian men aged between 20 and 25, often from the same hometown in Syria, due to financial pressures and male family members being gone. The marriages were usually done in Islamic ceremonies, so were rarely officially registered, making divorces frequent, which left girls “even more vulnerable, without inheritance or rights to alimony,” Sebzeci says.