Blog for Human Rights - Helping Turkish Women Escape Forced Marriages in Germany
May 15th, 2008 by SocProf and tagged Gender, Human Rights, Patriarchy, Sexism
Via Der Spiegel,
“Aylin (not her real name) had just turned 15 when her parents decided she should get married. She had finished her secondary school education and was studying nursing at a vocational school. Of course, she was still living with her parents, in a small town in the German state of Hesse.
A potential husband was soon found, M. from Frankfurt. He had studied business administration and was 13 years older than Aylin. “My parents met him at a relative’s wedding,” she recalls.
Aylin’s parents, who were both born in Turkey in 1954 but grew up in Germany, never bothered to ask if their daughter agreed with their choice. “I was engaged,” she says. “Or rather, I was sold.”
The fiancé’s parents paid Aylin’s parents €17,000 ($26,750) in cash and additionally gave them jewelry worth around €20,000. “Then we all went shopping in Turkey — his mother, my mother, him and me.” She needed a wedding dress, he a dark suit.
Four hundred guests came to the engagement celebration at Aylin’s parents’ house. Shortly beforehand, Aylin and her fiancé had come into closer contact for the first time. “He hit me in the face when I told him I didn’t like him,” she says. Nevertheless, the engagement proceeded as planned. “Then life in hell began.””
Of course, she was raped by her husband-to-be in her parents’ home and under constant surveillance. The nursing home where she worked was the only place she was allowed to go to without being accompanied. So, she stopped eating and was placed in a clinic for mental disorders. She loved it because her relatives were not allowed to visit her.
Then, after going back home, she decided to leave and went to Berlin. There, she moved in with an organization called Papatya, specialized in rescuing Turkish women and girls in such situations. But then, because she has to see a doctor and use her family medical card, her parents found her. She had to move back home.
“The only advantage to the situation was that Aylin’s fiancé called off the engagement and claimed back the “purchase price” he had paid.
But because Aylin had brought “dishonor” to the family, her parents had to find some way — or someone — to minimize the resulting moral and material damages. The new fiancé was 42 years old and still married, but he was wealthy and lived far away in Anatolia.
So that nothing could go wrong, Aylin’s mother accompanied her daughter to Turkey. “This time there was just a small ceremony,” Aylin recalls. “He’d been married. I’d been engaged — and was therefore second best.” The deal paid off for Aylin’s parents: they got a house and two cows from their daughter’s fiancé.”
Because her parents still wanted to collect benefits from the government, Aylin has to return to Germany after 6 months, otherwise, she’d lose her residency. It is during the visit that she called the police even though she was locked in at home. The police came and rescued her and sent her again to Berlin where she got help from Hatun and Can, an organization specialized in rescuing women and girls from forced marriage or potential victims of honor crimes.
Aylin is among the lucky ones. She landed on her feet. How many others are not able to escape or find the organizations that will help them integrate into German society and escape the backwardness of ethnic and religious oppression?
Posted in Gender, Globalization, Human Rights, Patriarchy, Sexism |
