Yehudis Fletcher and Eve Sacks on their journey to co-founding Nahamu, which seeks to raise awareness and challenge forced marriage in the Jewish community.
Eve speaks
In Pixar’s Brave, the heroine is Princess Merida, and the film’s protagonist is her mother, Queen Elinor, who is forcing her to get married. Under UK law, you have the right to choose who you marry, when you marry or if you marry at all. Forced marriage is when you face physical pressure to marry (for example, threats, physical violence or sexual violence) or emotional and psychological pressure (e.g. if you’re made to feel like you’re bringing shame on your family). Merida’s mother applies emotional pressure, saying she will let down her clan by not following the tradition. Watching Brave whilst I was researching and writing a paper on forced marriage, meant it was obvious to me that the arrangements for Merida would be criminal under UK law.
The crux of the forced marriage issue for me is the question - should religious parents be allowed to bring their children up in a closed system whereby all young people marry someone chosen by their parents, and where no other options are ever observed or presented?
I did not grow up in an insular community. When I was a teenager in Glasgow my friends were from a range of backgrounds, including traditional Jews like myself. But I had a glimpse into a more insular Jewish community as I knew some Charedi (Ultra-Orthodox Jewish) girls. These girls were home-schooled and did not mix with anyone outside their very small group (of around Charedi 10 families).
I attended a Sunday school with these girls. However, there was no opportunity to chat. There was a real but unspoken rule that we could not engage in open conversations, and the teacher was always present. The atmosphere was austere. We sat at the teacher’s large dining room table. We translated the Torah (Pentateuch) from biblical Hebrew into English.
When I was 16, one of the girls, a year older than me, got engaged to a young man she met once, just briefly, the first young man she had met. She would not see him again before the wedding. She was not allowed to speak to him on the phone. After the wedding she would move to Antwerp, shave her head and presumably have a large family. At the time I was working hard towards my highers, and considering my future career, and so I struggled to understand why anyone would agree to marry someone they’d met once, just briefly. But I could see that she had happily agreed to it.
10 years later I had graduated from the University of Manchester and I was living in London working as a chartered accountant. By this point, Yehudis was sitting around the same dining room table with the same teacher, translating the Torah with her peers, Charedi Glaswegian girls, many of whom were the younger sisters of the girls I had studied with. The difference was that Yehudis had a much more isolated upbringing than mine. The classes I attended on a Sunday morning were the type she attended all week.
Yehudis speaks
When I was a child, my mother told me that we didn’t believe in feminism and that each gender had their role to play. I always expected I would get married at 18, and I did. I saw it as my only route to adulthood, independence, and autonomy. I had no real idea what any of those words meant.
We are brought up from early childhood to marry the first person our parents suggest, and most of us go through with it without any question - because that is all we know. In my community, school books are redacted to ensure that any references to other ways of thinking are removed, public libraries are seen as dangerous and the internet is banned. We tend to only attend insular community schools, although some of these are state-funded, the curriculum is often restricted and Charedi children don’t mix with anyone different. There is no sex and relationship education until after young people are already engaged, so many don’t even think to question the matchmaking process. We are socialised to expect to marry someone we meet once. This is compounded by the huge emphasis on female modesty and gender segregation - so meeting more than ‘necessary’ is often considered immodest. No physical force is needed, but this is still a forced marriage.
In 2010, I was 22, married, and living in Edgware, North London. My son was a toddler and I was pregnant with my daughter. I discovered Mumsnet, where I was welcomed but also given a quick and brutal schooling in how the big wide world functioned. In one of my first posts, I asked for advice on how to manage my son’s diet, as he would only eat Shreddies. I regretted that one quickly! The constructs of intense othering that I had grown up with led me to quickly move on to confronting my own prejudices - Mumsnetters made quick work of my thread asking about the best way to ask for a white midwife.
Finally I asked ‘Does anyone else feel a duty to have sex with their husband?’ The thread started off light-hearted until suddenly it wasn’t. There seemed to be an awareness that this was an awakening for me.
It took years to get from that point to where I am now, having founded Nahamu and campaigning against forced marriage in my community, but I see Mumsnet as the first safe place I had to play with ideas and safely explore my curiosity.
Forced marriage, along with the other details of my life that I have shared, are often seen as faith-based or cultural practices. There is a nervousness in talking about it. Gatekeepers will try and deny there are any problems. We know that our community is far from the only one dealing with these issues. That is why we worked with the National Commission on Forced Marriage UK to raise awareness and why we wrote to the FMU asking for young people in our community to receive the same protection as other young people at risk of forced marriage. As the co-founders of Nahamu and authors of the first paper to address forced marriage in the Jewish community, we insist that young people, of every culture and faith, must have autonomy over who to marry, when to marry or whether to marry at all.
By Yehudis Fletcher and Eve Sacks.
Eve tweets at @EveSacks, Yehudis at @YehudisFletcher, and the Nahamu Project twitter handle is @PNahamu
From MNHQ: Eve and Yehudis have written this resource page on forced marriage for us, please take a look and share widely.
Eve and Yehudis will be returning to this thread to answer your questions for one hour on the 10th March at 10am, so if you have questions for them, leave them below.