The German newspaper the Spiegel has a great report up - as we are used from this newspaper - about a Turkish-German organization, Hatun and Can, that helps Turkish women escape from forced marriages. Quite some Turkish immigrants are forced to marry with whomever their father wants them to marry. The result is, most often, an unhappy, frequently even abusive marriage. The organization, therefore, does great work, that deserves to get a lot of attention and financial support (I’ll tell you how to donate to this organization below).

First some information about force marriages, and what it does to a girl:

Aylin (not her real name) had just turned 15 when her parents decided she should get married. She had finished her secondary school education and was studying nursing at a vocational school. Of course, she was still living with her parents, in a small town in the German state of Hesse.

A potential husband was soon found, M. from Frankfurt. He had studied business administration and was 13 years older than Aylin. “My parents met him at a relative’s wedding,” she recalls.

Aylin’s parents, who were both born in Turkey in 1954 but grew up in Germany, never bothered to ask if their daughter agreed with their choice. “I was engaged,” she says. “Or rather, I was sold.”

The fiancé’s parents paid Aylin’s parents €17,000 ($26,750) in cash and additionally gave them jewelry worth around €20,000. “Then we all went shopping in Turkey — his mother, my mother, him and me.” She needed a wedding dress, he a dark suit.

Four hundred guests came to the engagement celebration at Aylin’s parents’ house. Shortly beforehand, Aylin and her fiancé had come into closer contact for the first time. “He hit me in the face when I told him I didn’t like him,” she says. Nevertheless, the engagement proceeded as planned. “Then life in hell began.”…

M. came to visit every other day. “He had paid for me, he could do whatever he wanted,” Aylin recalls. “He could have killed me and my parents wouldn’t have done anything.” It even went as far as “forced intimacy” in the house. Aylin’s parents pretended not to notice…

She stopped eating and had to be admitted to a clinic because of “mental disorders.” “That was nice, my parents weren’t allowed to visit me.” The clinic released Aylin after three months and she moved back in with her parents. A week before the wedding date, Aylin asked her fiancé to give her some money so she could go shopping. Then she went to the train station and caught a train to Berlin.

She knew no one in the city, but had heard of an organization called Papatya (the name translates as “chamomile”) that helped runaway Turkish girls. She lived for two months in a safe house with other young women, who had all “gone through the same story.” But one day she needed to visit a doctor. There, she had to show her family health insurance card — and it didn’t take long before her parents found out where their daughter was staying. “I had to go back.”

The only advantage to the situation was that Aylin’s fiancé called off the engagement and claimed back the “purchase price” he had paid.

But because Aylin had brought “dishonor” to the family, her parents had to find some way — or someone — to minimize the resulting moral and material damages. The new fiancé was 42 years old and still married, but he was wealthy and lived far away in Anatolia…

“I was supposed to stay in Turkey, while my parents received child benefits for me in Germany.” In order not to lose her residency permit, Aylin needed to return to Germany within half a year at the latest, even if only for a few days. “Many people do it that way, so they don’t lose their social benefits.”

When Aylin arrived home, she was confined in the house by her parents, but they let her keep her cell phone. “I called the police from the bathroom. They got me out and took me to the airport.”

And there’s much more about her life.

Well, in the end she escaped again, and she ended up at Hatun und Can. This organization helps Turkish girls / women who don’t want to marry the man their father has chosen for them.

(what’s interesting about the report, by the way, is that Aylin and her family are from… Izmir. That’s the same city where my girlfriend lives, and - seemingly - it has changed quite a bit in the last 20 years. Forced marriages aren’t accepted there, nor are women encouraged to wear headscarves. Those who do are the exception, and looked down at by most citizens of Izmir; which is a very Kemalist, and therefore secular and modern city)

Since forced marriages are so horrendous, I thought that I would give you all the opportunity to donate to Hatun & Can. You can do so by clicking on this link. On the right side of the screen you will read “spenden über paypal.” Below it summe, and währung. In the “währun” you can change the kind of coin - it’s on Euro automatically, but you can change it into several others coins, such as the US Dollar. “Summe” means “amount.” It, automatically, stands on 5. If you want to give more, you can simply change the number. If you have selected the summe and währung you can click on the paypal button. After that, it’s quite simple.

Please - I’m especially calling on my Turkish readers - consider helping this organization out financially.