Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Published: May 13th, 2013 Updated: May 13th, 2013
Melbourne girls as young as 15 are being forced into marriages overseas, a parliamentary inquiry has heard.
There were three examples of forced marriage in one Melbourne high school, a migrant support worker told the inquiry.
Girls are being married off for money and for their husbands to obtain visas, Hiba Casablanca from the Shakti Migrant and Refugee Women’s Support Group said.
She told the federal inquiry into slavery and human trafficking about a 15-year-old Melbourne girl who thought she was going on holidays to Asia with her family, but was married off.
‘She had been taken on holiday by her family and was unaware of what would be happening to her,’ Ms Casablanca told the inquiry.
The girl’s husband is now trying to obtain a spousal visa to come to Australia.
Australian authorities have been told the girl, who was born overseas, is now 18 years old.
Read more: http://www.skynews.com.au/national/article.aspx?id=870952
Tags: abusive, forced marriage, haloproject, honour based violence, marriage, marry, psychologically, slavery, victims
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Published: May 13th, 2013 Updated: May 13th, 2013
SURAT: Two lovers from Naldhari village of Valiya taluka in Bharuch died on Friday during treatment after consuming pesticide. The deceased lovers were hurt after forced marriage of the girl with another youth and committed suicide.
Sangita Vasava, 23, had developed relationship with neighbour Paresh Vasava, 25, few years back. Both residents of Naldhari village have promised each other to get married after permission from family members. However, Sangita’s family wanted her to get married to another youth in a neighbouring village. Sangita was forced to marry to another youth in April and after staying for few days with her husband she came to hear parents home as part of ritual.
Read more: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/surat/Lovers-end-life-after-girl-forced-to-marry-another-youth-in-Surat/articleshow/20017895.cms
Tags: forced, haloproject, honour based violence, marriage, suicide, victims, violence
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Published: May 13th, 2013 Updated: May 13th, 2013
MELBOURNE, May 9 (Bernama) — Girls as young as 15 are being forced into marriages overseas, a parliamentary inquiry has heard.
A migrant support worker told the inquiry of three examples of forced marriage in one Melbourne high school, the Australian Associated Press reports.
Girls are being married off for money and for their husbands to obtain visas, Hiba Casablanca from the Shakti Migrant and Refugee Women’s Support Group said.
She told the federal inquiry into slavery and human trafficking about a 15-year-old Melbourne girl, who thought she was going on holidays to Asia with her family, but was married off.
“She had been taken on holiday by her family and was unaware of what would be happening to her,” Casablanca said.
The girl’s husband is now trying to obtain a spousal visa to come to Australia. Australian authorities have been told the girl, who was born overseas, is now 18 years old. In another example, a 21-year-old woman was married in exchange for money, Casablanca said.
Read more: http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v7/wn/newsworld.php?id=948550
Tags: forced marriage, haloproject, holiday, honour based violence, marry, victims, visa
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Published: May 7th, 2013 Updated: December 1st, 2021
In front of 300 villagers, Halima’s father shot her in the head, stomach and waist – a public execution overseen by local religious leaders in Afghanistan to punish her for an alleged affair. Halima, aged between 18 and 20 and a mother of two children, was killed for bringing ‘dishonour’ on her family. Police in the northwestern province of Badghis said Halima was accused of running away with a male cousin while her husband was in Iran, and her father sought advice from Taliban-backed clerics on how to punish her. “People in the mosque and village started taunting him about her escape with the cousin,” Badghis provincial police chief Sharafuddin Sharaf told AFP. “A local cleric who runs a madrassa told him that she must be punished with death, and the mullahs said she should be executed in public.
The father killed his daughter with three shots as instructed by religious elders and in front of villagers. We went there two days later but he and his entire family had fled.” Amnesty International said the killing, which occurred on April 22 in the village of Kookchaheel in Badghis province, was damning evidence of how little control Afghan police have over many areas of the country.
“Violence against women continues to be endemic in Afghanistan and those responsible very rarely face justice,” Amnesty’s Afghanistan researcher Horia Mosadiq said.
“Not only do women face violence at the hands of family members for reasons of preserving so-called ‘honour’, but frequently women face human rights abuses resulting from verdicts issued by traditional, informal justice systems.”
Police in Baghdis, a remote and impoverished province that borders Turkmenistan, said Halima had run away with her cousin to a village 30 kilometres away. Her father found her after 10 days and brought her back home, where clerics told him he must kill her in front of the villagers to assuage his family’s humiliation. A Badghis-based women’s rights activist said he had seen video footage of Hamila’s execution, which AFP was not able to obtain.
Read More: http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/international/04-May-2013/afghan-father-guns-down-daughter-over-affair
Tags: forced, halo project, haloproject, honour, justice, killed, killing, marriage, marry, murder, perpetrators, preserving, religious, victims, violence, women
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Published: May 7th, 2013 Updated: December 1st, 2021
EMC news – Aruna Papp never questioned the beatings she received from her husband and her father until she moved to Canada.
Papp, who grew up in India and was married by the age of 17, began working as a short-order cook at York University after emigrating in the ’70s.
After finding a second job as a women’s locker room attendant, she secretlybegan taking sociology courses in the building next to where she worked. After coming home one night and learning from her daughter that her father had instructed her husband to beat her “because that’s the only language she understands,” she escaped and lived in her car for two weeks before finding a bachelor apartment. Since then she has founded the South Asian Family Services and works with the York Regional police to educate them on cultural differences and honour based violence.
The author of Unworthy Creature: A Punjabi Daughter’s Memoir of Honour, Shame and Love, Papp told the group at an Algonquin College workshop on April 23 that telling her story was tough, but it became necessary to help women gain equal rights.
The workshop, In the Name of Honour: Responding to victims of Honour-Based Violence and Forced Marriage, was hosted by the college’s victimology program, the Ottawa police victim crisis unit and the Department of Justice. The workshop marks the fourth year of the college program. It’s a one-year graduate certificate course that takes grads from social work, policing and nursing. The program was created four years ago. Each year, the speaker panel is made up of people who have been victims of violent crime, along with police officers, counsellors and social workers who have worked in various parts of the country’s judicial system.
Read more: http://www.emcbarrhaven.ca/20130502/news/College+tackles+’honour+killings’,+Police+see+need+for+education
Tags: abusive, constant abuse, forced, forced marriage, high risk, honour, honour based violence, marry, murder, physical, victims, violence
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Published: April 29th, 2013 Updated: April 29th, 2013
Foreign Office reveals cases from Italy, Holland, Australia, Indonesia and Nigeria, with one in five victims a man, and ages ranging from five to 87.
Britain’s forced marriage victims are being coerced to marry in more far flung places and at a much younger age than previously thought.
Last year more than half of the 1,500 cases the Foreign Office dealt with were connected to families in Pakistan, but cases also came from Bangladesh, India, Afghanistan, Italy, Holland, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Nigeria and Iraq. One in five victims was a man. Ages ranged from five to 87.
In each case of forced marriage, there are often several perpetrators. Yet almost no one is prosecuted in the UK. There is general agreement that forcing a person to marry against their will is a human rights abuse and that the authorities should do everything possible to protect victims from forced marriage. But that’s where the consensus ends. The UK Government is considering whether to make forced marriage a new criminal offence and opinions are divided about the potential risks and benefits.
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-forced-marriage-victims-much-younger-than-previously-thought-7608813.html
Tags: coerced, criminalisation, cultural insensitivity, forced marriage, Foreign Office, halo project, honour, honour based violence, racism, victims, violence
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Published: April 29th, 2013 Updated: April 29th, 2013
There is a very real issue of violence towards women in British Asian society, but let’s not dress it up as something cultural.
This week’s Panorama, Britain’s Crimes of Honour, made for harrowing viewing. In the space of 30 minutes, the programme recounted horrific murders of women in the UK. There was video footage of Banaz Mahmod, the young Iraqi Kurdish woman from south London whose family murdered her and buried her in a suitcase after she was spotted kissing her boyfriend outside a tube station. There was the grieving mother of Laura Wilson, the teenager from Rotherham who was knifed repeatedly by her boyfriend, Ashtiaq Asghar. Then there was the wedding clip of Nosheen Azam, who came to Sheffield from Pakistan as a young bride and was trapped in an abusive marriage. She was found in her back garden, aflame. Nosheen survived but is brain dead, her body badly burnt. No one knows whether she set herself alight to commit suicide or whether it was attempted murder. Her father, who visits her in a care home, wiped tears from his eyes as he recalled telling her not to leave her husband, for the sake of her family’s pride.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/21/honour-crime-domestic-abuse
Tags: abusive, Asian, bride, burnt, forced, forced marriage, halo project, honour based violence, marriage, marry, murder, victims, violence
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Published: April 29th, 2013 Updated: April 29th, 2013
“I was not interested in marriage at all. But my mother and grandmother forced me to accept. I do not like the bridegroom. I am happy that the district administration has stopped my marriage because I was only around 16,” says a girl from Melapuliyur, who is one of the 167 girls in Perambalur district whose marriage was stopped under the Child Marriage Act 2006.
In most of these marriages, the bridegroom was the relative of the girl, more often than not a cousin. Another common strain is that the parents were hardly educated.
Asked whether they were aware that getting married before the age of 18 was illegal and physically it could lead to complications when marrying at such a young age (even resulting in death at the time of childbirth), most of the girls either confessed ignorance or chose to keep silent.
Similar was the response from the parents too when asked whether they were not risking the life of the girl if she was to be married at a young age. Most of them remained downcast admitting they were at fault. However, a woman said: “I also got married when I was less than 16 and I am perfectly all right. I had no complications at all.” Her worry is “who will marry my daughter whose marriage has been stopped after the betrothal?”
Read more: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Tiruchirapalli/poverty-ignorance-force-parents-to-marry-off-their-daughters-early/article4656628.ece
Tags: betroth, child brides, Child Marriage Act, forced, forced marriage, halo project, honour based violence, infant mortality, marriage, marry, maternal mortality, violence, young age
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Published: March 7th, 2013 Updated: April 29th, 2013
Women who find themselves victims of forced marriage and honour based violence are being urged by Derbyshire’s Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner, Hardyal Dhindsa, to seek help from the police.
Mr Dhindsa, speaking out in the lead-up to International Women’s Day on Friday, said: “Forced marriage has far-reaching impacts, and particularly with regard to safeguarding children and families.
“I am, however, pleased to say that multi-agency professional help is increasingly emerging. Both the police and partner agencies know about these crimes and ready to help victims find a solution.”
He added: “Only this week we saw the launch of a Government-funded smartphone Freedom app. It provides information and sources of help aimed not just at potential victims – who so often don’t know where to go for help – but also at their friends, teachers and professionals.”
He also acknowledged Prime Minister David Cameron’s promise to make forced marriage a criminal offence and said he hoped it would be sooner rather than later. It is hoped that legislation will be brought forward this year or next.
Read more: http://www.derbyshiretimes.co.uk/news/local/deputy-commissioner-speaks-out-against-forced-marriages-1-5476709
Tags: crime, forced marriage, Foreign Office, halo project, honour, honour based violence, marriage, marry, murder
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