Europe tackles forced marriage

The unhappiest person at Gülcan Güntemur's wedding was the bride - Ms. Güntemur herself.

Wearing the white wedding dress she bought in Turkey a few weeks before, Güntemur sat at the banquet table next to her new husband, a complete stranger, and fought back tears. Most of the 400 guests in the festive hall in Cologne knew that her father was making her marry a man she neither loved nor knew.

"It was like a theater performance," she says, recounting the story almost a decade later. "My friends all had goose bumps. They said, 'We don't recognize you at all.' "

Shame and honor kept the shy 23-year-old from running out of the hall, away from the marriage her father had forced on her and the community had accepted with its silence.

In immigrant communities in Germany and other European countries, arranged marriages are common for the daughters of immigrant parents who want to preserve ties to the homeland and shun what they view as corrupt Western European practices.

More often than not, the young women accept these arrangements, knowing that their parents have found them a suitable companion. But when daughters are forced into marriages, women like Güntemur can be relegated to lives of violence, isolation, and abuse, say women's-rights activists.

There are few reliable numbers on how many women in Europe's Arab, South Asian, Turkish, or Eastern European communities are suffering in unions not of their choosing. France and Norway have programs that counsel women facing or fleeing forced marriages. Britain boasts a special desk in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) that helps citizens who are forced into marriage overseas. Last year, the desk's second year in existence, the FCO reported some 200 cases of forced marriage. British police have adopted procedural guidelines for handling the problem.

In Germany, a few extreme cases, like that of a Kurdish woman murdered by her brother in 2000 because she had a German boyfriend, garner media attention. But activists say law enforcement and politicians continue to look at forced marriage as a cultural issue, rather than a human rights question.

That might change, however, as Germany begins looking more critically at its integration problems decades after the first immigrants arrived. German state and federal politicians are promising to take action.

"We maybe missed out on this subject, or overlooked it," acknowledges Christian Storr, who heads the office of the Immigration Commissioner and Justice Minister in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Storr's office is responsible for drafting a bill that would jail those involved in arranging marriages. "Maybe it will be a signal to these families, that we are aware of [the problem], and maybe it will stop some from doing it."

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