Yasmin (name altered) has a presentiment. She has just turned 16. In the past weeks, she was not allowed to take a single step on her own. Her brothers picked her up from school and her parents forbade her to meet her friends. Now the whole family is going to visit relatives in Lebanon during the holidays. The parents have given a cousin’s wedding as the reason for the trip. But Yasmin fears it will be her own. She does not know to whom she was promised.
Myria Böhmecke from the women’s rights organisation Terre des Femmes knows of many cases that have happened in this or similar ways. In big German cities like Berlin, Hamburg or Frankfurt, forced marriages of girls and young Muslim women are no longer a marginal phenomenon but widespread.
The last nationwide study on forced marriages was commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs in 2008. It surveyed counselling centres: 3443 people, mainly young women, had asked for help there in the course of a year because of a threatened (60 percent) or already enforced (40 percent) forced marriage. “We assume that the number of unreported cases is much, much higher,” says Böhmecke. Especially minors do not dare to seek help in counselling. “There is the extreme relationship of dependence on the parents.”
Imke Steinberg (name changed) is a teacher at a secondary school in the Neukölln district of Berlin and reports similar experiences. For more than ten years, she has been looking after the girls at the school together with social workers. She has often accompanied schoolgirls who have decided to be taken into care because of a threatened forced marriage, i.e. they have left their families and been accommodated in protected flats of the Youth Welfare Office. However, it is always a long way until such a step is taken. “About 90 percent don’t make it the first time,” Steinberg knows. For many, breaking off contact with the family is unbearable. When talking about forced marriage, she often hears the remark: “That’s the way things are in Islam.”
Steinberg reports that she once discovered engagement photos from Turkey of one of her students on Facebook. The parents had previously declared that the 15-year-old girl was ill. “We built up pressure,” she says. Again and again she called the family and had to listen to absurd excuses. “Then we said that if the girl was not back in school in three days, we would call the police.” The threat was effective, and the family did indeed travel back. This was especially important because there were other daughters in the family, says Steinberg.
In general, it is the positive experiences that give her strength: when Steinberg was able to bring a student to safe accommodation and then hears that she has started an education and is going her way. Or when a conversation with the parents is held and a possible forced marriage is at least questioned. But she also knows how traumatic such situations are for the girls. “There is always a blind spot.
Girls account for about 90 per cent of forced marriages. But there are also cases of boys and young men like that of the German-Lebanese Nasser. When Nasser was 15, his parents found out about his homosexuality. His father considers this a disgrace to the family and abuses him severely. In a cloak and dagger operation, the father and two uncles drag Nasser into a car and try to get him to Lebanon to marry him off, as he himself says. But the plan is discovered. The Youth Welfare Office had already been informed. The car is stopped at the Romanian-Bulgarian border. Nasser made his fate public and in 2015 denounced his father and uncles for abducting minors and depriving them of their liberty. The accused have to go to court and get off with a fine of 1350 euros – a verdict that many people observing the trial consider too lenient.
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