Marriage Stumble

I was kinda surprised today....Germany admitted that it was forging ahead and criminalizing forced marriage.  In Alabama (where I grew up)....forced marriage kind of meant that some local boy was real stupid....got some girl pregnant, and her dad shows up with a baseball bat to indicate you would marry her (to make the situation right).  Everyone went along with this....even though everyone knew they'd be divorced within five years.  Yeah, we can admit it was stupid.

In this case, there is a fairly different scenario to view.  Forced marriages in Germany fit strictly into Muslim family situations.  You have some 16-year old girl who starts to look like a "problem".  The problem typically means that she's very liberal....anti-family....not cooperating with traditions of a typical Muslim family....and she needs intervention.

This intervention means that some cousins go out and find an older true-to-Islam guy and he's brought in to meet Dad to work out the arrangement.  Days later, Dad has a meeting with the daughter and lets her know that he's pick her husband, and it might be six months away or six days away.

The daughter typically freaks out.  She never expected Dad to be this crazy.  She talks to Mom....which does nothing for her case.  She talks to her cousin, who insists this is for her own good.  And then she has the last option of just trying to escape from the family.

Over the past ten years....there's dozens of episodes where young girls were forced to marry, or ran off to be found by the family later and beaten (in some cases, murdered by the family).

The government says that if convicted of a forced marriage (both Mother and Father) could end up with five years.  I'm guessing if kids are still left in the house....the DA would likely go for a full five year period for Dad, and maybe let Mom off with almost nothing.

This is an interesting mess.  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s....there weren't many of these forced marriage episodes.  In some ways, this mess comes up now because of increased Islamic peer pressure and more Mosques in existence than thirty years ago.  If some local guy thinks Musaff has gotten disrespect from his daughter....he'll make it a group topic and force Musaff into some reactionary phase that normally he would have never done.

In some ways....it's an integration problem.  People have their old perceptions in abundance, and need some fresh peer pressure that isn't of a Muslim variety.

I sat and pondered over this.  It's kinda funny when compared against Germans.  Here we have a vast number of German women.....some into their forties and fifties....still single, and Dad (Huns is now seventy years old) wished he had "forced" Dora to marry that punk idiot Dieter down the street back in 1988.

To be kinda honest, there's this vast problem of Germans 'waiting' for long and extended periods....before ever marrying.  You could have some healthy, highly educated, fit, lusty German gal standing there at age thirty-three, and really wishing something would happen.  Maybe some Prince Charming character from a foreign land (maybe Boaz, Alabama) or Italy walks up and she decides she'll overlook twenty of his serious faults and just accept the fool.

So, this is an interesting slice of German life to compare against a non-integrated German life.  One needs some help, and the other has to be threaten with five years in prison if they do anything stupid involving marriage.