Golale Sharafkandi har deltatt i to seminarer arrangert av Kvinneutvalgets ressursgruppe og er en kurdisk fagperson med mye kunnskap innenfor tema tvangsekteskap og kvinnerettigheter. Her er hennes notater fra et seminar i Lillestrøm:

Forced Marriage

It seems logic to begin with providing a definition of Forced Marriage. Usually Forced marriage is defined as a marriage contracted without the free and valid consent of one or both parties. A marriage becomes forced if there is any pressure, whether physical or mental, to marry without free and valid approval. Force can be of various types from emotional pressure, exerted by close family members and the extended family, to more extreme cases, which can involve threatening behavior, abduction, imprisonment, physical violence, rape and in some cases murder.
There is sometimes confusion between arranged marriage and forced marriage. A clear distinction must be made between a forced marriage and an arranged marriage. In arranged marriages the families of both spouses take a leading role in arranging the marriage but the choice whether to accept the arrangement remains with the individuals. In forced marriage at least one party does not consent to the marriage and some element of force is involved.
Forced marriage is primarily an issue of violence against women. Most cases involve young women and girls, although, there is evidence to suggest that as many as 15% of victims are male.
Parents who force their children to marry often justify their behavior as protecting their children, building stronger families and preserving cultural or religious traditions. They do not see anything wrong in their actions.

Often parents believe that they are upholding the cultural traditions of their home country, and they do not consider themselves to violate the rules of the new society where they live. Sometimes they even believe that they are protecting their children from the threats of the society through encouraging or forcing them to marry someone they think is the proper choice for them.

Some parents come under significant pressure from their extended families to get their children married. On some occasions parents came under pressure to marry off their daughters, even when they had no intention of doing so. Forced or planned marriages are used to reinforce kinship of networks and group boundaries and to maintain the cultural distinctiveness of the group and its identity.
Forced marriages usually take place in societies which are somewhat community oriented. This obviously does not mean that forced marriages have to happen in communities where the collective is important. But we have to see and acknowledge the role of collective pressure in order to be able to fight it.
Children of collectivistic cultures are expected to understand and act on a strong sense of responsibility toward the family, the group and the community. Family loyalty can make it harder to say “No, I do not want to marry this person”, or make it harder to stick to a “no” when your parents don't listen.
In some cases it is the overseas relatives who are pushing for marriages and in almost all cases the relatives hold the girl and arrange the marriage so they play a significant part to make sure it goes ahead.

Community oriented cultures see people as deeply interdependent with their group. Hence, making unconventional choices is far more “costly” in a community oriented context, than in an individual oriented one. Those who do break out of a forced marriage or leave their family out of fear that they will be forcibly married, are often alone in a sense that is hard for people from an individual oriented community to understand.

Although motivations are complex and highly personal and oversimplification needs to be avoided, the causes come from three main categories of family, sexuality and independent behavior and finally honor. This type of marriage becomes not only a strategy for sustaining relations with their children but also maintaining family respect and honor in the community.
To be more informative some of the key motives behind forced marriage can be classified as follows:
• Controlling unwanted behavior and sexuality (including perceived promiscuity, or being gay, bisexual or transgender) - particularly the behavior and sexuality of women
• Peer group or family pressure
• Attempting to strengthen family links
• Ensuring land remains within the family
• Protecting perceived cultural ideals which can often be misguided or out of date
• Protecting perceived religious ideals which are misguided
• Preventing "unsuitable" relationships, e.g. outside the ethnic, cultural, religious or caste group
• Assisting claims for residence and citizenship
• Family honor
• Long-standing family commitments
A very important topic here is honor. According to the honor code, power is rested in male leaders who have judicial authority over other group members. Honor depends on control over the female body. Violence can be used if it is necessary to maintain that control. And dishonor afflicts not just individuals but the collective as a whole. In other words a woman can have honor but it is not her own, it is her husband’s or her father’s. Her honor is a reflection of the male pride of the family as a whole. Parents consider it to be their greatest responsibility to guard the honor of their daughters and through them their own honor. Forced marriage and honor killing are both linked to such conceptions of honor.

Clearly there are differences in the way that men's and women's behavior is regulated and that is why forced marriage is mainly related to women.

The regulation of young women’s movement is implemented by the women in the household, mothers, elder sisters and mothers-in-law, and this clearly shows how women internalize patriarchal ideology and then become its enforcers.

Thus, in the case of forced marriages, women are in many cases voluntarily involved in acts of coercion and even violence due to the way they have been socialized. While in some instances there may be pressure put on the mother by the husband to make children accept the marriage, in many cases they are active agents.

It is very difficult for women to act against the wishes of their parents or in cases where their husbands, whom they were forced to marry, have abused them. In many respects the phenomenon of forced marriages closely parallels domestic violence. Forced marriage is an abuse of human rights and cannot be justified on any religious or cultural grounds.

As far as elders are concerned the problem lies with the youth who go against the wishes of their parents. Whoever our parents chose for us we went along with that. This form of passive agreement by the young people is what elder generations want from their own children or grandchildren. There is an implicit rationalization of forced marriages as a short-term problem that is ironed out over time as the couple come to terms with the marriage. The differences in marriage practices are reflected in the elder generation’s insistence that both religious and cultural factors should be taken into account.

The dichotomy between culture and religion has always been argued about. While it is said that forced marriage is not a religious issue and every major faith condemns it and freely given consent is a prerequisite of Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh marriages but some parents justify their behavior relying on the religious idea that we did whatever our parents decided. This is in Islam – to do what your parents want. No parents will want anything bad for their children. Parents certainly seek good families for their children and, so when we were consulted, we just agreed.

Another reasoning coming from religion is that by arranging marriage you can prevent your kids having affairs before marriage since any sexual relationship out of marriage is considered forbidden in various religions. In other words you help your children to avoid “haram” and that is why so many parents force their children to marriage in early age of teenager hood.

Another justification coming from religion is the problem that parents are afraid of their children getting married or falling in love with someone from another religion. To prevent this happening they try forced or arranged marriage. While there is a clear understanding that force is unacceptable there is a lack of clarity over what is the definition of coercion and this can be an issue when considering inter-religious relationships. There are parents who say “if my daughter went out of Islam, you know to get married, I don't know, non Islamic or in any other way, I would most ... definitely use force to prevent”.

Those were the general patterns or reasons behind forced or arranged marriage but when it comes to the Kurds, the story is somehow more related to the nationality and language and belongingness to the Kurdistan and remaining Kurd. Since linguistic nationalism is the primary feature of national identification. In other words marriage is used as an important tool in maintaining the cultural distinctiveness of the group and is very closely related to issues of identity and belonging.

However it must be mentioned that like any other community Kurdish community is not a homogenous one and there are various forms of arranged marriages and the social class and educational backgrounds of parents are closely linked to the degree of choice that is offered to children in the arrangement of marriages.

Kurds who have a background of rural or working class family would be more possible to force their daughters to a marriage which is planned and decided by the parents. Kurdistan area in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey has been an economically deprived area and the economy has a direct influence on the cultural improvement or struggle against traditions. The phenomenon of putting themselves on fire by girls who have been forced to marry somebody they did not like is a very horrible reality in Iranian Kurdistan. We witness many girls committing suicide in very poor rural and small communities there. They do not have any one to ask for help but how is the situation here. Do we have any problem with our children choosing whoever they want? Do we allow them to marry a Swedish boy from a family we do not know? Are we worried about our daughters having or experiencing love relationship before marriage? What can we do? What is the solution?
The story begins when we start to think about our child getting married. We begin to talk about our child's marriage, perhaps suggesting or looking for potential partners. Is it the case that marriage is discussed, but with no mutual acceptance or rejection of ideas or there is pressure to marry, which may take the form of emotional blackmail or appeals to conform to traditional family roles and values. Do demands to accept a marriage proposal are accompanied by emotional pressure? Here is the line.