More than 150 people joined us today via Zoom for our parallel event to the United Nations’ (virtual) 65th session of the Commission on the Status of Women.
We watched the award-winning, feature-length documentary film Knots, which follows three U.S. forced and child marriage survivors — including our Fraidy Reiss. And then Mabel van Oranje, founder of Girls Not Brides, led a discussion with the film’s stars and producer/director about how eradicating forced and child marriage is necessary to achieve gender equality.
“It takes a village to end forced and child marriage in the United States,” Fraidy said. “Please be a part of that village.”
About Knots
Knots: A Forced Marriage Story, written and directed by Kate Ryan Brewer, is a feature-length documentary film that examines the truth about forced marriage in the U.S. through the complicated experiences of three survivors: Fraidy Reiss, Sara Tasneem and Nina Van Harn. The film shows how forced and child marriage are human rights abuses that remain legal in most of the U.S., impacting mostly women and girls. These abuses often mean a lifetime of rape, abuse and domestic servitude, and the loss of reproductive and financial rights.
About Unchained At Last
Unchained At Last is the only organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the United States through direct services and advocacy.
Unchained provides crucial legal and social services, always for free, to help women, girls and others in the U.S. to escape arranged/forced marriages. At the same time, Unchained pushes for social, policy and legal change; the organization started and now leads a growing national movement to eliminate child marriage in every U.S. state and at the federal level.
Unchained is an Organization in Special Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council since 2017.