RIGHTS-FRANCE: New Moves to Fight Forced Marriages

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Dec 26 2005 (IPS) - Fatia was in love, but months earlier she had been forced into marriage with another man.

“When my mother realised I did not want to marry the man she had chosen for me, she warned me, ‘either you marry him, or you are not my daughter any more’,” Fatia, 23, told IPS. “I went to the town hall to my marriage as if I was going to my own execution, but nobody cared there about my feelings. I just got married to a man I had hardly met – and whom I did not love.”

In time she came to love someone else. “I thought I was going mad,” she said. “I was falling in love with this wonderful guy, and at home I had to go to bed with another man, whom I feared, and with whom I did not have anything to do, least of all any intimate life. It was terrible.”

This conflict continued for several months, until Fatia’s mother agreed to do her bit now to help end the marriage. She spoke to Fatia’s husband and after a long dispute he accepted dissolution of the marriage.

Today, Fatia shares her life with the man she loves. Not a perfect partnership, but at least this is what she wanted. “It is my life, whatever mistakes I commit, I have to come to terms with them,” she said.

Fatia is not alone.. According to official estimates, up to 100,000 young French women, mostly adolescents from families of immigrant origin, risk marriages forced by their families, regardless of the girls’ feelings.

The French parliament unanimously passed a new law this month forbidding marriage of girls under 18 years of age. It provided for a probation period of two years after the marriage ceremony to allow spouses to demand annulment of a marriage..

The law provides for counselling, proof of consent, education in schools against such marriages, and for protection for women fleeing forced marriages.

“With this text we want to improve the measures preventing violence in the family as well as the violation of women’s rights,” minister for justice Pascal Clement said during the parliament debate. But not everyone is convinced that the new law can end such practices.

“We are satisfied with the law itself,” Clotilde Lepetit, law counsellor for the women’s rights groups ‘Ni putes ni soumises’ (‘Neither whores nor slaves’) told IPS. “But now we wait for the results.”

Khadija Aram, president of the association ‘Women from Trappes and from Elsewhere’ based in Trappes city on the outskirts of southern Paris says it will take mothers, not the law to stop forced marriages.

“Either elder women in the families realise that forcing a girl to marry a man she does not love is wrong, or the law will remain dead letter,” she told IPS.

Aram said forcing girls into marriage arranged by the families is traditional in the Maghrib countries, but also in other societies in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia.

“Our mothers and grandmothers were forced by their own families to marry men they hardly had met before, and despite the sometimes unpleasant experiences they had to go through in such marriages, many women still believe that such a tradition is suitable for their own daughters and granddaughters,” she said. “Many of them still believe that love will come with the daily routine of living with someone.”

But despite such prevailing views, a growing number of the elderly women are coming to realise that the tradition is mistaken, Aram said. “At our meetings, many women tell their own stories, and admit how dreadful such forced marriages were for them. And then they say, no, I do not want my daughters going through the same fate.”

According to the ministry of social affairs, one French woman dies every four days as a result of violence within the family. One out of ten women, and one in three being treated in hospital emergencies claims to have been a victim of domestic violence..