By Jessica Reed
Last Tuesday Britain discovered the tragic story of Gina Satvir Singh, a young ex-bride caught in an arranged marriage for months in 2004. She had been routinely forced to do menial works for dusk until dawn by her mother-in-law and treated as a slave. Singh sued her jailer under the 1997 Protection from harrassment Act and won £35,000 in compensation. The case was unusal, but there is hope that her example will 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 in which laws are set to protect them - if only in theory. But in Afghanistan for example, 'child brides' are quite common. Those children-wives (some as young as 11 years old) are usually considered as human-currency used to pay off family-debts or settle quarrels. The prepubescent girls are merely products, sold during sickenning man-to-man transactions regardless of 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". This is after the Afghan President Hamid Karzai 'urged islamists to ban forced marriages'.
If those women's rights violations are sometimes hard to even imagine for women who freely dispose of their bodies and minds, the photographs by Stephanie Sinclair can give us a terribly moving idea of what the lives of these little girls are -and will be- like. Although 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.
But then there's another kind of arranged marriage : those sought by rich American men travelling to Eastern Europe in search for 'the perfect wife', as this fantastic Harper's piece illustrates. 'A foreign Affair - On the great Ukranian bride hunt' 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, pressured by a dark horizon made of lack of prospects, misery and unemployment. The 'great American dream' keeps them going, providing them solace and hope.
Reading the article I got the feeling that an impressive number of those 'wives-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 struck me as similar to some extreme parts of the newly-trendy academic field of 'Masculism' - its goal is to restaure what sense of pride men feel they've been robbed of by the feminist movement.
I can understand the identity-crisis. However when reading about those men's behaviour, I really fail to feel any kind of empathy or compassion for them at all.
Elsewhere: Rawa.org, the Revolutionnary Association of the Women of Afghanistan + Susan Faludi said back in 1999 that American men are angry, lost and frustrated because 'what it is to be a man' has been destroyed.
