A twenty-year-old girl was manipulated into getting married

A Norwegian-Pakistani girl, Mariam, was psychologically pressured to get married. A Norwegian judge annulled the marriage after a trial. They threatened her, and her husband’s family even tried to poison her.

NRK reports that Mariam is the victim’s false name. She was anonymized to tell this story. For Mariam, it all started when a guy added her as a friend on a social network. They knew each other before. Both were born in Norway to Pakistani parents. The young people communicated for some time, but she did not perceive this as anything more than a stage of acquaintance. But one evening his whole family was standing at the door.

“I had a slight suspicion, but I thought this couldn’t be true,” Mariam recalls. From the kitchen she overheard a conversation in the living room. The guy was talking about marriage.

“Nobody asked me anything,” the 20-year-old woman emphasized. Mariam received gifts, attention, and was also under psychological pressure. The girl tried several times to tell her parents that she would not marry this man.

“My mother said it would have had serious consequences both for her and for the family’s status within the Norwegian-Pakistani community if we had not married. My father demanded that I agree out of respect for my parents, so that the family would not be ostracized,” says Mariam.

It is noted that there was no physical violence, but there was prolonged psychological pressure.

“It was manipulation,” Mariam admits now.

Mariam’s upbringing was strict – she learned to put the honor of her family above herself. Especially after reaching puberty, she experienced strong social control from her family and extended relatives. There were watches and rules about who she could and couldn’t be with.

“I was afraid that they would see me with my classmates, because all the guys I talked with became my parents’ boyfriends,” the girl explains.

Let us recall that in 2018, Statistics Norway (SSB) conducted its large-scale survey among Norwegians born to immigrant parents. Among other things, they studied the great influence of parents on the choice of a spouse. Nearly one in five women of Pakistani origin said their parents had a very large or somewhat significant influence on the election.

Mariam’s experience of facing strict rules as a teenager applies to many migrant girls in Norway. Researchers from the University of Oslo analyzed the responses of 25 thousand Oslo school students in 2021. It was clear that many of the newcomer girls faced restrictions from their parents. And that this continued even when the girls reached adulthood.

Nearly half of the girls testified that they were not allowed to have a private life during their senior year of high school. About one in three were not allowed to meet friends of the opposite sex. Boys had looser frames.

Mariam’s wedding in Norway looked big and impressive. But as the girl says, she just sat and watched from the side: “I couldn’t understand whether it was rigged, forced, or whether I chose it myself. I thought forced marriage was either this or you die. It was something different.”

After several months of living together, Mariam realized that she did not have her own life, and she left for her parents and never returned to her husband. The parents agreed that the daughter wanted to end the marriage.

A friend who was studying law told her about psychological coercion.

“At first I didn’t want to admit it, everyone was nice. He contacted me. But the more he talked, the more I felt involved in it,” Mariam concluded. The girl went to court and got the marriage declared invalid: she was not divorced, but received the marital status of being unmarried. The judge found it proven that the marriage was forced. The marriage law in Norway allows this to be done within one year after the person has understood and freed himself from psychological coercion. Norwegian publications have found ten such civil trials since 2000. Most of them were Norwegian-Pakistani.