A mother has become the first person to be jailed under Australia’s forced marriage laws, for ordering her daughter to wed a man who would later murder the 21-year-old.
Sakina Muhammad Jan, who is in her late 40s, was found guilty of coercing Ruqia Haidari to marry 26-year-old Mohammad Ali Halimi in 2019, in exchange for a small payment.
Six weeks after the nuptials, Halimi killed his new bride - a crime for which he is now serving a life sentence.
On Monday, Jan - who pleaded not guilty - was sentenced to at least a year in jail, for what a judge called the “intolerable pressure” she had placed on her daughter.
Escaped a fundamentalist, authoritarian regime only then to implement her own personal authoritarian, fundamentalist beliefs.
Not to excuse the mother, but I wonder if trauma played a role. She was traumatised by a toxic situation and perhaps to gain a sense of control, she repeated it to others. There is a book called “The Body Keeps a Score”. The author is a psychologist, inspired from when he was a child when his father, a Holocaust survivor, told him to not question him and just obey. To which the author replied that he sounded like the Nazis who imprisoned him. Again, I’m not trying to excuse, but I’m curious if the Afghan mother has had something similar experience and acting on trauma.
Could also be culture and the people around her enforcing the behavior.
The article states that played a part.
That’s a pretty fucked up thing to say because your dad won’t let you stay out after 11