Hannan Serroukh’s stepfather wanted to marry her off shortly before her 15th birthday. The now 47-year-old woman is a member of the Politeia Foundation and has been fighting for over 30 years to prevent the same fate from happening to other girls in Spain. The number of forced marriages in our country has increased by 60% since 2015.
Hannan Serroukh was born in Barcelona to Moroccan parents who emigrated to Spain in the late 1960s. Her life, integrated into Spanish society, was happy until the death of her father. Then began a nightmare whose consequences continue to this day.
Her mother remarried another Moroccan who, according to Hannah, used her mother to come to Spain. As a follower of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood organisation, his goal was not to work, as his parents had done, but to open a mosque in Figueras.
With their arrival, Hannan and her mother’s lives changed radically: music was forbidden in their house, they had to wear the hijab and no longer communicate with their Spanish friends. In his opinion, the girl was “heavily contaminated by the West”, Hannanan recounts, “and that’s why he felt I should marry a man from his faith”.
She responded quickly: “He had made allusions to my past life and that made me flee. She travelled to Girona, where she was picked up by a train driver who took her to the police, whereupon she was taken to a youth protection centre.
By escaping, Hannan was able to avoid becoming a victim of forced marriage. This practice has increased by 60% in Spain since 2015 and takes place every two seconds worldwide, according to the international organisation Plan. 14% of these forced marriages involve girls under the age of 15, and only one in three girls has reached the age of 18.
Be that as it may, and according to Hannan Serroukh, the statistics in our country are disturbing, as only a few girls report this forced marriage. However, in Catalonia, the number of complaints has doubled since 2017 until today.
According to her, it is the imams in the mosques who bless these marriages, which are often only registered in the country of origin of the girls’ parents until they are 18 and then registered here. “There have been cases of couples appearing in public as uncle and niece, even though they are entering into a marriage recognised by the imam,” says Hannan.
According to her, the regions in Spain most affected by this practice are Catalonia, Valencia, parts of the Basque Country, Fuenlabrada in Madrid and Algeciras in Andalusia.
How should a daughter behave who is forced by her own family to marry a man she does not even know? Serroukh says she has to face “an arduous but rewarding journey”. She has to approach the security forces in the best possible way, tell them her situation and they will take care of her as she is protected by our state institutions”.
“Everyone is the master of his/her own life and the shaper of his/her own future,” concluded Hannan, who was able to escape a forced marriage but had to pay a high price: she has not met her mother and siblings since. El Mundo
