Forced marriages take place all over the world, both in times of peace and in times of conflict. This book provides a comparative perspective on the criminalisation of forced marriage, focusing on the question of whether, and, if so how, the practice of forced marriage should be criminalised under Dutch and international law.

A broken-hearted divorcee. A pregnant survivor. Can they turn an unwanted marriage… into love? Wyoming, 1866. Brandon Herman wants to drink away his heartache. Divorced, disgraced, and out of work, the last thing he wants to do is marry again. When he’s strong-armed into marrying a Crow Indian woman, he only thinks of running away… until he learns his bride-to-be is nine months pregnant… Lokni doesn’t trust her pale-skinned husband. After all, his kind raided her tribe, killed her loved ones, and stole her freedom. If it weren’t for the contractions, she would've already left her intoxicated groom. But until the baby is born, Lokni must bide her time and plan her escape… As the unlikely couple embarks across the untamed West, Brandon’s support helps their friendship to blossom. They start to realize that it’s more than the baby that draws them together. But on the trail to a brighter future, not everybody they meet is interested in their happily ever after… Forced into Marriage is a historical western romance set in a more realistic Wild West. If you like spirited characters, journeys of exploration, and the healing power of family, then you’ll love Ruth Ann Nordin’s stirring tale.

With forced marriage, as with so many human rights issues, the sensationalized hides the mundane, and oversimplified popular discourses miss the range of experiences. In sub-Saharan Africa, the relationship between coercion and consent in marriage is a complex one that has changed over time and place, rendering impossible any single interpretation or explanation. The legal experts, anthropologists, historians, and development workers contributing to Marriage by Force? focus on the role that marriage plays in the mobilization of labor, the accumulation of wealth, and domination versus dependency. They also address the crucial slippage between marriages and other forms of gendered violence, bondage, slavery, and servile status. Only by examining variations in practices from a multitude of perspectives can we properly contextualize the problem and its consequences. And while early and forced marriages have been on the human rights agenda for decades, there is today an unprecedented level of international attention to the issue, thus making the coherent, multifaceted approach of Marriage by Force? even more necessary.

This testimony exposes the realities of forced marriage. Leila tells of how she was brought up in France by Moroccan-born parents and then forcibly married to a man 15 years her senior whose language she couldn't understand. She tells how she escaped the violence of this marriage to fight back against family tradition.

Drawing on cases, Stark identifies the problems with our current approach to domestic violence, outlines the components of coercive control, and then uses this alternate framework to analyse the cases of battered women charged with criminal offenses directed at their abusers.

Towards the end of 2008, news audiences in the United Kingdom followed the story of Humayra Abedin, a 33-year-old NHS doctor from East London who was allegedly being held captive in her native Bangladesh by her parents who planned to force her to marry a husband they deemed suitable for her. Abedin sought help, and returned to the United Kingdom on the 16th of December after the High Court had issued an injunction ordering the parents of Abedin to free her. This story does not stand alone: most Western European countries know of similar cases. According to Razack, such cases have signalled the beginning of European legal involvement in the area of forced marriages. Since the 1990s, forced marriage has become a hot political issue in several European countries. The aim of the study was to create an international and actual overview on the policy on forced marriages in Western Europe. Seeing that the study deals with debates and policy it is necessary to emphasise here that the topic of the study was not so much actual cases of forced marriage as the perception of forced marriage in the different countries. The central question was then to examine what is known about the policy and discussions on forced marriages in Belgium, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Instead of focusing exclusively on policy, a choice was made for including the societal context in the form of debates on forced marriage in order to have a more complete overview.