A Wife Bound by Shame

The unhappiest person at Sibel Öztürk's wedding was the bride herself.

Wearing the white wedding dress she bought in Turkey a few weeks before, Öztürk (Her name has been changed) sat at the banquet table next to her new husband, a complete stranger, and fought back tears. Most of the 400 guests in the festive hall in Cologne knew that her father was making her marry a man she neither loved nor knew.

"It was like a theater performance," she says, recounting the story almost a decade later to DW-WORLD. "My friends all had goose bumps. They said, 'We don't recognize you at all.'"

Shame and honor kept the shy 23-year-old from running out of the hall, away from the marriage her father had forced on her and the community that had accepted with silence.

Hers is a story replayed countless times in immigrant communities in Germany and other European countries. Parents view arranged marriages as a way to preserve ties to the homeland and shun what they view as corrupt Western European practices.

More often than not, the young women accept these arrangements, knowing that their parents have found them a suitable companion. But when daughters are forced into marriages, women like Öztürk can be relegated to lives of violence, isolation, and abuse, say women's-rights activists.

No reliable figures, not much help, for victims

There are few reliable numbers on how many women in Europe's Arab, South Asian, Turkish, or Eastern European

Women from South Asia, Eastern Europe as well as North Africa face the same ordeals.