There was a time when Sweden didn’t have forced marriages…….
Oh boy, but they sure do now….
Three prosecuted in Sweden’s first forced marriage charge
Published: 21 Jun 2016 07:00 GMT+02:00
The woman’s father and two other men are accused of carrying out a series of crimes against her 21-year-old boyfriend in Lund. The indictment says they abducted, assaulted, robbed, extorted and sexually harassed him in November 2015.
On the same night as the alleged abduction, the woman’s father is accused of making illegal threats that involved pushing her into a marriage against her will.
“This is Sweden’s first forced marriage indictment as far as I know,” prosecutor Ulrika Engwall told news agency TT, adding that she believed all of the alleged crimes were honour-related.
Two of the suspects, the woman’s father and a close friend of his, are being held in custody. The third remains at large.
“The woman did not comply with what the family thought and continued the relationship [with the 21-year-old] after she was married off,” said Engwall.
Johan Sjöström, a lawyer representing the woman’s father, said his client rejected all of the allegations against him and insisted that his daughter had agreed to the marriage.
Sweden enacted a new law to combat forced marriage in July 2014. Despite a number of reports being filed, this is the first case to result in an indictment.
Historically, forced marriage was also used to require a captive ( slave or prisoner of war ) to integrate with the host community, and accept their fate. One example is the English blacksmith John R. Jewitt, who spent three years as a captive of the Nootka people on the Pacific Northwest Coast in 1802–1805. He was ordered to marry, because the council of chiefs thought that a wife and family would reconcile him to staying with his captors for life. Jewitt was given a choice between forced marriage for himself and capital punishment for both him and his “father” (a fellow captive). “Reduced to this sad extremity, with death on the one side, and matrimony on the other, I thought proper to choose what appeared to me the least of the two evils” (p154).
Apples and oranges comparison. The forced non-muslim captive is not “integrated”, but fodder for more abuse. The dhimmi caste society is not a part of the host society, but a permanent subjugated class.