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  Fleeing 'Life in Hell': German Charity Helps Turkish Women Escape Forced Marriages

Fleeing 'Life in Hell' German Charity Helps Turkish Women Escape Forced Marriages

By Henryk M. Broder

Part 2: 'You’re Going to Marry Him, Whether You Want to or not'

Muslim men's attitudes to women is the reason why Yasmina (name changed) has a Polish boyfriend. He, too, is occasionally “a little macho man,” she says. Nonetheless, he is still "different from a Turk.”

Born in the Turkish city of Izmir in 1986, Yasmina came to Bremen with her parents at the age of two. Her mother was a housewife and her father a small businessman who soon opened a fruit and vegetable shop.

Yasmina finished her secondary school education and would have liked to continue and study for the university entrance exam, but her parents didn’t approve; they had long before promised their daughter to a cousin in the south-western German city of Freiburg.

When the "engaged" couple met for the first time, she was 19 and he 27. “I found this man disgusting, he was big and fat," she recalls. "My father said: 'You’re going to marry him, whether you want to or not.'”

The official engagement took place in Bremen in 2006. “I couldn’t even talk to him without someone else being there.” Yasmina continued to live with her parents in Bremen. She wasn’t allowed out of the house alone and she had no money of her own, not even a cell phone.

One day in September 2007 she had finally had enough. She snuck out of the house at daybreak and hitchhiked to the northern city of Kiel. When she realized she had relatives in the city who might see her on the street and recognize her, she headed further north to Flensburg, where she stayed in a women’s shelter. Through a coincidence, one of her brothers found her and took her back to Bremen.

She tried again early in 2008. This time she made it to Berlin, where she lives in a small apartment together with her boyfriend Pawel, whom she met in Flensburg. Yasmina too is receiving help from the organization Hatun and Can, and she is training to be a beautician.

She no longer wants to have anything to do with her parents. “They kept hitting me ever since I was six years old. To this day I don’t know why.” She has three brothers and seven sisters, who all do what their parents expect of them. “You are brought up in a way to make sure you stay dependent,” she says. “I’m the black sheep of the family.”

Yasmina has no contact to other Turks. Asked if she could imagine marrying a Turkish man, she throws her arms in the air. “Anything but that!”

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