salad in wrote on Mar 25
th, 2011 at 9:37am:
Just like Sybella I feel trapped by my religion. Once I became a New Age Muslim my wife told me I had to wear the burqa and I was not allowed to leave the kitchen sink unless there was a good excuse. The only danger we pose to the lifestyle of Australians is that we aim to smash every totem associated with the West. No more democracy, freedom of religion, gambling, R-rated movies and video games etc. So there isn't much to worry about with muslim immigration.
Germany Calls Time On Forced Marriages
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Underlining a new mood spreading across Europe, the German Parliament passed a law on March 3rd to make forced marriage a criminal offence carrying a five year prison sentence. The law also granted to non-German citizens who have been taken abroad against their will a legal right to return to Germany.
This is an example of a European government doing its job — creating and policing the non-negotiable framework within which other actors can get on with religious reform and cultural innovation and establish what the academic Bassam Tibi calls a “civil Islam” capable of accommodating cultural modernity.
Experts and support groups estimate that over one thousand women in Germany become victims of forced marriages each year. Although the facts have been long known due to the work of Serap Cileli (see film here), Halis Cicek, Sabatina James, Necla Kelek, and others, until now neither the government nor civil society had done much about it.
Forced marriage is only one expression of the suffocating and sometimes deadly male power exercised over many Muslim women in Germany.
A 2004 German study commissioned by the Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth found that 49 percent of Turkish women had experienced physical or sexual violence in their marriage, while a quarter of those married to Turkish husbands met their grooms on their wedding day. Half of these women felt pressured to marry partners selected by relatives and 17 percent felt forced into the partnership.
Some Muslim girls have been known to disappear from their schools to travel to Turkey and other Muslim countries to marry, having been told they were going on a holiday. A “bride-price” is negotiated and payment secures the right of the husband’s family to untrammelled patriarchal power over the girl and any children she bears.
Young Turkish women brought to Germany are sometimes kept as virtual house-slaves. “[They] don’t even know where they have been living for years,” says Katrin Fliess, a leader of a Munich-based women’s support group. Necla Kelek, author of a book about the forced marriages of Turkish migrants in Germany (Die fremde Braut or “The Foreign Bride”) has claimed that thousands of Anatolian women bought to Germany to marry German-Turkish men are modern-day slaves:
The typical import bride (import-gelin) is usually just 18 years old, comes from a village and has in four or six years barely learned how to read and write. She gets married off by her parents to a man she doesn’t know, but who is probably related, of Turkish origin, and living in Germany. After marriage she comes to a German city into a Turkish family. She lives exclusively in that family, does not have contact with people outside the Turkish community. Soon she will give birth to one, two, three children … She will live in Germany, but she will never arrive there.
A range of physical and psychological traumas have been associated with forced marriages.
The Turkish-German therapist Halis Cicek wrote Traditionelle Vergewaltigung (“Traditional Rape”) about his experiences counseling the victims. His description of one patient shows why the new law was needed. “Her life is hell. Her husband beats her and rapes her. She wanted a divorce, but then her own father and her brother said they would come up here from Turkey and kill her. She is now about 30 years old. Her condition became so bad that she had to be hospitalised. Recently, she applied for a disability pension.”
Many Muslim girls lead double-lives because they fear the wrath of their families. A suicide prevention program had to be set up by the Berlin hospital Charité for young girls of Turkish origins with the message “end your silence, not your life.”
And some live life on the run under the protection of shelters and women’s organisations, such as the Peri Association for Human Rights and Integration.
Women who rebel risk much. When Hatun Sürücü , divorced the Turkish cousin she had been forced to marry at 16, enrolled in college, and began dating, she was killed by her three brothers. Hatin’s murder sparked a national debate only when a school teacher reported a group of 14-year-old Turkish boys mocking Hatin in class: “She only had herself to blame. She deserved what she got. The whore lived like a German.”
In 2005, Der Speigel reported that “The Turkish women’s organization Papatya has documented 40 instances of honor killings in Germany since 1996.” Among the cases, a Darmstadt girl killed by her two brothers who beat her to death with a hockey stick in April 2004 because she had slept with her boyfriend.
Why has Germany been so slow to protect these German girls?
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/new/blogs/johnson/date/2011/3/22