Choice and luck?

I wrote this little piece today after doing a bit of research about Forced Marriages...

Last Tuesday here in Britain we discovered the tragic story of Gina Satvir Singh, a young ex-bride once caught in an arranged marriage. She had been routinely forced to do menial works for dusk until dawn by her mother-in-law. Treated as a slave, her marriage fell apart and finally went to pieces when she decided to move out of their shared house. Sign sued her jailer under the 1997 Protection from harrassment Act and won £ 35,000 in compensation. The case was unusal, but I rejoiced at the thought that the young woman won her case - maybe her example would encourage newly-wed women in similar positions of abuse to seek both freedom and justice.

Regardless of how many women probably endure such living conditions in the UK, they are still living in a country which laws are set to protect them - if only in theory. Some women in other parts of the world cannot claim to have such a set of choices at their disposition - the choice to sue, to willingly enter an arranged marriage, or to fight for their rights with the support of local NGOs. In Afghanistan, the societal phenomenon of 'child brides' is still going strong.

Children-wives (some as young as 11 years old) are quite common in the country, and usually considered as human-currency used to pay off family-debts or settle quarrels. These prepubescent girls are just products part of a sickenning man-to-man transaction, regardless of the Afghan civil and family code of 1921 which banned child marriage, or the article 22 of the 2004 Afghan Consitution which clearly sets that "the citizens of Afghanistan – whether man or woman – have equal rights and duties before the law" .

If those unspeakable human rights' violations are sometimes hard to even imagine for women who freely dispose of their bodies and minds, then I suggest looking at photographs by Stephanie Sinclair can give us a terribly moving idea of what the lives of these girls are like. It made me weep.

... And this is after Afghan President Hamid Karzai 'urged islamists to ban forced marriages'.

Right.

Although I think that little data is available (forced marriages often take place in remote or rural part of the world), estimates point out that about 1 in 7 girls in the developing world gets married before her 15th birthday. According to PeaceWomen.org, the highest percentage of mentally-ill patients in Afghanistan are female, with an "overwhelming majority of them who have been forced to marry against their will".

How "lucky" are we all 'western women'? And why do I feel it is revolting to talk about 'being lucky' since having a choice over our own selves should be the norm?

I also read a piece yesterday about another kind of arranged marriage : those sought by rich American men travelling to Eastern Europe in search for 'the perfect wife'.

Words failed me.

'A foreign Affair - On the great Ukranian bride hunt' (click on link!) is the real-life non-fairy tale of lonely men spending weeks (and thousands of dollars) scanning potential candidates -or 'their stock', as one of them puts it- before offering one of them a life free of material worries. These women often enter the nuptial agreement willingly, often pressured by a dark horizon made of leck of prospects, misery and unemployment. Their fantasies about the 'great American Dream' keeps them going, offering them solace and hope.

An impressive number of those wife-hunters seem to harbour an unusual level of resentment and bitterness against 'American women'. They refer to them as emasculating and unobedient monsters who ultimately are a threat to their masculinity, money and estate. This state of mind is similar to some extreme parts of the newly-trendy academic field of 'Masculism', whose goal is to restaure what sense of pride men feel they've been robbed of by the feminist movement.

However when reading about their behaviour, I fail to feel any kind of empathy or compassion for them at all.

In fact, f#ck them all*.

(*I realise I sound a bit like the cliche angry feminist lately and I should apologise. That and I still only have an internet connection at work!)