This news story revolves around the poor family of Afghanistan, who was settled down in Australia ,its youngest daughter Ruqia Haidari caught prey of cruel custom of forced marriage against the will or desire of girls.
The youngest of five children, she was born in Afghanistan in 1999, just a month before her father, a fruit and vegetable seller, was killed by the Taliban.
So desperate was her mother to protect her children that she fled with the four youngest – all aged under five – first to Pakistan then to Australia, where they settled in Shepparton, a regional town in northern Victoria in 2013.
Australia offered the children opportunities their mother, Sakina Muhammad Jan, never had. They went to school, learned English, and made friends outside their Hazara community, an ethno-religious minority with a long history of persecution in Afghanistan.
But a decade on, Haidari is dead, and her mother has served the first week of a three-year sentence for forcing her to marry a man against her wishes to study and get a job.
Jan is the first person in Australia to be convicted of forced marriage since it was criminalized in 2013. The court heard there was no suggestion she knew her daughter’s husband would kill her just weeks after she moved in with him. The crime carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison for victims over 18, but Jan was sentenced to three, to be released with restrictions after 12 months.
Since then, word has spread about what the sentence means, particularly for parents who feel compelled to push their children to marry due to their own beliefs or community pressure.
“It has caused a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety in our community,” said Helena Hassani, an expert on forced marriage in Australia with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and founder of Boland Parwaz, an organization that seeks to end child and forced marriage. “That day when she was sentenced, we had a family gathering. A lot of middle-aged women who never talk about these things were asking me, what’s going to happen? Is she going to go to jail?”
“I was like, yes, she’s sentenced, and you’re going to have to be really careful, because forced marriage is illegal in Australia,” said Hassani. “And they’re really looking pale, because I know at least one of their daughters are being forced to get married in Australia.” A life sentence
Forced marriage is considered a form of gender-based violence that predominantly affects young women, whose control over their lives is passed without consent from their parents to their partners. It can lead to decades of physical and psychological abuse, and in some cases suicide or murder.
In the past six years, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has received 531 reports of forced marriages in Australia, most involving children under the age of 18.
Haidari’s was one of them.
She was introduced to her future husband, Mohammad Ali Halimi, on June 1, 2019, and the very next day began confiding her objections to her friends, her driving instructor, her teachers, then ultimately the police.
Officers spoke to her on August 19, but the next day a mullah was called to officiate a permanent Nikah ceremony, confirming the couple’s earlier engagement.
He paid her family a dowry of 15,000 Australian dollars ($9,700).
A people response.
Jennifer Burn, the founding director of Anti-Slavery Australia, says that women inside and outside the country seek help every day via My Blue Sky, a website that offers free and confidential advice to women stuck in or trying to avoid forced marriages.
“Australia is so multicultural, and we have reports across the board, all religions, all ethnicities,” said Burn, who has campaigned against modern slavery for more than two decades. Forced marriages have been reported within communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and India, among others.
Often, those at risk are young girls from socially conservative families, who are living at home and are reluctant to go to the police because they don’t want their parents to get into trouble. The practice has been going on for decades, but in recent years the Australian government has made a point of targeting offenders, and on the day of Jan’s sentencing, the attorney general announced the start of consultations about what a stronger civil response could look like.
Changes could include allowing victims to apply for a court protection order against potential offenders or relaxing the rules so that adults can be added to airport watch lists, if there’s a fear they could be taken abroad to be married.
“This idea of building greater civil protection for people who are facing forced marriages is really, really important, and that can go hand in hand with the criminal response,” said Burn.
Some of the measures borrow from forced-marriage laws in Britain, where hundreds of people take out protection orders each year to thwart an impending forced marriage.
The United Kingdom also has the interagency Forced Marriage Unit, which works with the foreign and interior ministries as well as charities to try and stop British victims being compelled to marry both at home and abroad. The unit’s latest statistics show 69% of cases referred to them involve female victims, while 31% are male.
Other countries such as France, Canada and Germany also have specific laws against forced marriage.
Support is already given to women within Australia, but in late July rules were relaxed so that social welfare groups can also refer victims for crisis support and accommodation, alongside the AFP.
“You don’t need to talk to the police. You can be supported for up to 200 days, and potentially more,” said Burn. “You’d be provided with comprehensive 24/7 casework support, including accommodation. That is something that can be incredibly important in a crisis situation