Ruqia Haidari was the baby of the family.
The youngest of five children, she was born in Afghanistan in 1999, just a month before her father, a fruit and vegetable seller, was killed by the Taliban.
So desperate was her mother to protect her children that she fled with the four youngest – all aged under five – first to Pakistan then to Australia, where they settled in Shepparton, a regional town in northern Victoria in 2013.
Australia offered the children opportunities their mother, Sakina Muhammad Jan, never had. They went to school, learned English, and made friends outside their Hazara community, an ethno-religious minority with a long history of persecution in Afghanistan.
But a decade on, Haidari is dead, and her mother has served the first week of a three-year sentence for forcing her to marry a man against her wishes to study and get a job.
Jan is the first person in Australia to be convicted of forced marriage since it was criminalized in 2013. The court heard there was no suggestion she knew her daughter’s husband would kill her just weeks after she moved in with him.
“You were the trusted and only living parent of the victim. It was your acts of coercion that caused her to enter the marriage,” Judge Fran Dalziel told Jan from the bench at Victoria County Court, in comments that had to be translated into Jan’s native language, Dari.
The crime carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison for victims over 18, but Jan was sentenced to three, to be released with restrictions after 12 months.
Since then, word has spread about what the sentence means, particularly for parents who feel compelled to push their children to marry due to their own beliefs or community pressure.
“It has caused a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety in our community,” said Helena Hassani, an expert on forced marriage in Australia with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and founder of Boland Parwaz, an organization that seeks to end child and forced marriage.
“That day when she was sentenced, we had a family gathering. A lot of middle-aged women who never talk about these things were asking me, what’s going to happen? Is she going to go to jail?”
“I was like, yes, she’s sentenced, and you’re going to have to be really careful, because forced marriage is illegal in Australia,” said Hassani. “And they’re really looking pale, because I know at least one of their daughters are being forced to get married in Australia.”
A life sentence
Forced marriage is considered a form of gender-based violence that predominantly affects young women, whose control over their lives is passed without consent from their parents to their partners. It can lead to decades of physical and psychological abuse, and in some cases suicide or murder.
In the past six years, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has received 531 reports of forced marriages in Australia, most involving children under the age of 18.
Haidari’s was one of them.
She was introduced to her future husband, Mohammad Ali Halimi, on June 1, 2019, and the very next day began confiding her objections to her friends, her driving instructor, her teachers, then ultimately the police.
Officers spoke to her on August 19, but the next day a mullah was called to officiate a permanent Nikah ceremony, confirming the couple’s earlier engagement.
He paid her family a dowry of 15,000 Australian dollars ($9,700).
Halimi returned to his home in Perth in Western Australia, under the agreement that his wife would join him when she finished high school.
“In our community, in our culture, we have got this saying, which is girls should leave their parents’ home with a white dress, which is your wedding dress, and they should leave their husband’s home again with a white dress, which is your coffin,” said Hassani.
And that is exactly what happened to Haidari.
In January 2020, within weeks of a party to celebrate their marriage at a sports center in Shepparton attended by 500 guests, Halimi killed his young wife.
At home in Perth, he had been arguing with Haidari’s brother on the phone, and when the call ended, the unhappy newlyweds continued to fight.
According to court documents, Haidari told him to “f*** off,” and he grabbed a large kitchen knife and lunged at her with such force that he severed two of her arteries.
Halimi pleaded guilty, telling police he’d become increasingly frustrated after she repeatedly rebuffed his attempts at sexual intimacy. He also complained that she had failed to cook or keep the house clean, and often slept while he worked seven days a week to support them.
Halimi was sentenced to life in prison.
“She really did not want to get married,” Hassani, of UTS, said of Haidari.
“She came back from Perth, asking the family, please don’t let me go, please get my divorce, and mom was like, ‘No, go back.’”
“You’re supposed to leave your husband’s home with white coffin, which she did, poor lady.”
A civil response
Jennifer Burn, the founding director of Anti-Slavery Australia, says that women inside and outside the country seek help every day via My Blue Sky, a website that offers free and confidential advice to women stuck in or trying to avoid forced marriages.
“Australia is so multicultural, and we have reports across the board, all religions, all ethnicities,” said Burn, who has campaigned against modern slavery for more than two decades. Forced marriages have been reported within communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and India, among others.
Often, those at risk are young girls from socially conservative families, who are living at home and are reluctant to go to the police because they don’t want their parents to get into trouble.
The practice has been going on for decades, but in recent years the Australian government has made a point of targeting offenders, and on the day of Jan’s sentencing, the attorney general announced the start of consultations about what a stronger civil response could look like.
Changes could include allowing victims to apply for a court protection order against potential offenders or relaxing the rules so that adults can be added to airport watch lists, if there’s a fear they could be taken abroad to be married.
“This idea of building greater civil protection for people who are facing forced marriages is really, really important, and that can go hand in hand with the criminal response,” said Burn.
Some of the measures borrow from forced-marriage laws in Britain, where hundreds of people take out protection orders each year to thwart an impending forced marriage.
The United Kingdom also has the interagency Forced Marriage Unit, which works with the foreign and interior ministries as well as charities to try and stop British victims being compelled to marry both at home and abroad. The unit’s latest statistics show 69% of cases referred to them involve female victims, while 31% are male.
Other countries such as France, Canada and Germany also have specific laws against forced marriage.
Support is already given to women within Australia, but in late July rules were relaxed so that social welfare groups can also refer victims for crisis support and accommodation, alongside the AFP.
“You don’t need to talk to the police. You can be supported for up to 200 days, and potentially more,” said Burn. “You’d be provided with comprehensive 24/7 casework support, including accommodation. That is something that can be incredibly important in a crisis situation.”
A mother behind bars
Straight after Monday’s sentencing hearing, Jan was taken away to spend her first days inside a women’s prison on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Her barrister Andrew Buckland said that, as an illiterate, non-English speaker, it’s likely she doesn’t have a good understanding of what’s going on, though she has indicated she wants to appeal the sentence.
As a permanent resident and not an Australian citizen, Jan’s sentence will cost her far more than 12 months in prison. Under Australia’s Migration Act, her visa could be cancelled under rules that seek to remove non-citizens who commit serious crimes.
A month before Jan’s sentencing, the immigration minister circulated a directive specifically naming the crime of forced marriage as serious enough to warrant the removal of a visa. Without a visa, Jan would be subject to deportation to her home country of Afghanistan, although as signatory to the Refugee Convention, Australia is obligated to not send refugees back to potential harm.
Since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in August 2021, the persecution of Hazaras has escalated alongside increasing deprivations for women who are now living under a system of “gender apartheid,” according to the United Nations.
Without a visa, after serving her sentence, Jan could be forced into immigration detention, or potentially released under a bridging visa with strict monitoring conditions including the use of an ankle bracelet.
During Jan’s sentencing hearing, Judge Dalziel cited a letter of support from the Goulburn Valley Afghanistan Association that described her as “a quiet, kind and helpful woman.”
However, Hassani says Jan has lost the respect of the community she tried so hard to please.
“It has really damaged her reputation, her respect, and she has literally no place in the community,” she said.
Like many perpetrators, Jan was also a victim of forced marriage, compelled to marry a man she didn’t know at age 12. Her first baby followed soon after.
Her parents would likely have believed they were acting in her best interests.
“The whole community believes that if you have got a husband, then you’re respected, you’re valued, the whole world is yours,” said Hassani. “To be a good woman, you have to be married, and you have to be a nice, obedient wife.”
To be divorced is to bring shame on the family. It can also be financially debilitating for whichever party has to pay back the dowry and cost of wedding celebrations.
“A lot of girls would rather suicide, than live with that shame and stigma,” she said.
Divorcees are labeled as “bewa,” which was the label attached to Haidari years earlier when her mother arranged for her to marry another man at age 15. That union ended in divorce.
The court heard that Jan thought that marrying off Ruqia would be in her best interests.
“Whilst you believed you were acting in her best interests, you were not in fact doing so,” said Judge Dalziel.
It’s not acceptable within the Hazara community to force a child to marry. But it does happen, and the value the community places on marriage makes it hard to break the cycle.
But Hassani believes change can happen – she’s already seeing younger generations pushing back against the pressure placed on them to marry.
“I’m really happy that a lot of children who have grown up here are standing up for themselves,” she said. “But it still needs a lot of time to resolve this clash between parents and the community’s expectations.”