{"id":746,"date":"2015-01-08T12:08:56","date_gmt":"2015-01-08T12:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/?p=746"},"modified":"2015-01-08T12:08:56","modified_gmt":"2015-01-08T12:08:56","slug":"against-their-will-inside-canadas-forced-marriages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/against-their-will-inside-canadas-forced-marriages\/","title":{"rendered":"Against their will: Inside Canada\u2019s forced marriages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Forced marriage is one of the last taboos to break. A new law could make it a crime. So why do those who champion prevention oppose it?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Two weeks after her 18th birthday, Lee Marsh was sitting at the kitchen table one Sunday, reading the Bible, when her mother came in and announced that Marsh would marry a 20-year-old member of their Jehovah\u2019s Witness congregation in Montreal. The girl was stunned; she had met her husband-to-be just once. Five weeks later, it was done.<\/p>\n<p>For a few months before, her mother had been shopping her around while sizing up men in the congregation\u2014some more than 20 years older\u2014looking for a suitable husband. She made Marsh wear a tight, low-cut white dress bought for the outings. \u201cI hated wearing it. I\u2019ve always preferred to be covered up,\u201d Marsh says. \u201cBut my mother really wanted me to be attractive to these men.\u201d Marsh\u2019s mother had rejected all the suitors up to that day in 1970 when she announced the match. \u201cI knew I wasn\u2019t allowed to have an opinion. This wasn\u2019t a woman that you said no to.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Marsh thought about the leather strap hanging by the front door, the one her mother used when the children\u2014Marsh was the eldest of four\u2014dared to defy her. They never knew what would set her off; two weeks before, Marsh had got it for not cleaning the house properly. So Marsh buried the feelings of anger and betrayal she felt toward the woman who had abandoned her twice already in her short life: After her parents divorced when she was nine, she was left behind in Toronto with a father she says sexually abused her; later, in Montreal, when she had returned to her mom, she says her mother\u2019s Jehovah\u2019s Witness boyfriend also sexually assaulted her, and she was sent into foster care.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Read More:\u00a0http:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/news\/canada\/against-their-will\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forced marriage is one of the last taboos to break. A new law could make it a crime. So why do those who champion prevention oppose it? &nbsp; Two weeks after her 18th birthday, Lee Marsh was sitting at the kitchen table one Sunday, reading the Bible, when her mother came in and announced that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[165,7,4,210],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-canada","tag-forced-marriage","tag-halo-project","tag-jehovahs-witness"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":747,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions\/747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}