NPR’s On Point today features Unchained’s founder and executive director, Fraidy Reiss, in a discussion about forced marriage in the U.S.

For details on how to listen, click here.

Arranged/forced marriage in the U.S.

Al Jazeera today featured the story of Unchained’s founder, who fled an arranged marriage her family had arranged from her when she was a teenager, and now helps other women un-arrange their marriages and re-arrange their lives.

Here’s the story:

Al Jazeera published a piece titled “Forced marriage is alive and well in the US,” the first of a four-part series. It was a “look at how cultural misunderstanding and lack of legislation leave forced-marriage victims in shadows.” The piece included a look at Unchained At Last and its founder/executive director.

Here’s the piece:

Sarah Fournier

Vidya Sri was a typical American teenager in the Queens borough of New York. She went to school, hung out with her friends and took dance classes. But all that changed when she was 18 and started dating her first real boyfriend, a sweet Irish Catholic boy.

That was in 1987. Alarmed that Sri was dating someone who wasn’t Indian, her father shipped her off to India to live with relatives. Nearly every day for four years, she was pressured to get married. It became a condition of her return to the United States. Finally, she gave in and married a man she did not know.

“I was introduced to him, and a week later we were married,” said Sri, now 44 and divorced.

The marriage was recognized by the U.S., and the couple moved to New York. But Sri didn’t love her husband, wasn’t attracted to him and said she felt as if they came from “two different planets.” Despite not wanting to consummate the marriage, Sri gave in to family pressure and had two children with her husband.

Sri was a victim of forced marriage, a practice in which women — and sometimes men — are forced to marry against their will. The Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit organization that helps immigrant women and girls who have been abused, determined that there were as many as 3,000 confirmed or suspected cases of forced marriage in the U.S. from 2009 to 2011.

That the numbers aren’t clear is part of the problem.

“We hide. We hide very carefully,” said Sri, who now works at her own organization to help prevent forced marriages like hers. “This whole thing is so humiliating. It’s so shaming, all you really want to do is drop dead.”

For those who might think that forced marriage isn’t much of an issue in the U.S., a host of organizations, scholars and victims beg to differ. A constellation of factors — from cultural misunderstandings to lack of legislation — keeps the issue in the shadows here, although activists are hoping that a growing awareness in Europe will bring changes in the U.S. as well.

The AHA Foundation, an advocacy organization founded by vocal women’s rights defender Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who escaped her own forced marriage in 1992, funded a recent survey of immigrant populations in New York conducted by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. The results show that the issue of forced marriage is very much alive and probably underdocumented.

“Forced marriage is only one variant of the honor violence that happens in these communities,” said Ric Curtis, a professor of anthropology at John Jay, who led the survey.

Forced marriage in context

While forced marriage may sound like the concept of arranged marriage — with parents playing matchmaker for their children — the element of coercion when a marriage is forced often leaves women feeling “like slaves,” according to Tanya McLeod, senior campaign organizer at the Voices of Women Organizing Project (VOW), an organization dedicating to providing help and resources to victims of domestic violence in New York.

Sri, who was forced to marry in India, now runs GangaShakti, a New Jersey–based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping victims of forced marriage find resources. She said the fact that the issue is often conflated with arranged marriage is a problem when protecting victims like her.

“They say forced marriage doesn’t happen (in the U.S.). You really mean arranged marriage,” she said. “But in my case, this was not an arranged marriage. There was violence. There was coercion. There was fraud.”

While Sri was not a victim of physical violence, she said that the “mental torture” from her father drove her to attempt suicide.

She is also a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her work aims to raise awareness about forced marriage all over the world. She recently published a paper in which she outlines the dearth of resources for forced-marriage victims in the U.S.

 Sarah Fournier

In June 2012 the United Kingdom announced it would criminalize forced marriage, following the lead of Norway, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Cyprus and Malta. In 2012 alone, the U.K. Forced Marriage Unit noted 1,485 casesrelated to possible forced marriage.

Curtis said that current research only scratches the surface of a problem he suspects is more widespread but largely hidden from public view.

His team interviewed 100 students at several City University of New York campuses, focusing on Middle Eastern, North African and Southeast Asian (MENASA) countries to try to determine how widespread forced marriage really is.

According to the AHA Foundation’s 2013 annual report, of the people surveyed by John Jay, 88 claimed that they knew at least one person who did not want to get married but did. Of those, 31 said they knew three or more people forced into marriage.

“All that we are seeing is the ugly tip of the iceberg, but how much more is there?” Curtis said.

In 2013 the AHA Foundation helped 54 victims of forced marriage and honor violence, a 54 percent increase from the previous year. Through interim direct services, the foundation refers women seeking help to local social services, legal specialists and law-enforcement officers in their area who can offer protection.

All we’re seeing is the ugly tip of the iceberg, but how much more is there?

Ric Curtis, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Fraidy Reiss grew up in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and at 19 was married to a man after only a few brief interactions over three months.

“There is intense pressure not to reach the age 20 and still be single,” Reiss said. “Because that’s a death sentence. You don’t want to be the old maid at age 20.”

After she escaped her forced marriage, Reiss started Unchained at Last, an organization dedicated to helping victims of forced marriage escape. During her marriage, she faced death threats from her husband and eventually had to get a restraining order to protect herself and her two daughters.

Currently her organization, which she founded two years ago, is helping 70 women from communities ranging from traditional Jewish to MENASA in the New York–New Jersey area.

Difficult to prosecute

For Curtis, the fact that forced marriage falls outside the scope of New York and federal laws makes the issue hard to define and prosecute.

Among U.S. jurisdictions, only nine — California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, Oklahoma, the Virgin Islands and Virginia — have legislation that could encompass forced marriage, according to the Global Justice Initiative. New York has no forced-marriage law on the books. There is no federal law protecting victims.

“Here if you go to the police with a marital problem, the first thing they are going to do is arrest your husband,” Curtis said. “They are just not trained to deal with those kind of problems. They need to build some expertise around this issue.”

Chris Boughey is a detective from Peoria, Ariz., who has made it his mission to combat forced marriage and subsequent honor killings nationwide. According to Boughey, honor violence occurs when someone who is seen as defying her family’s culturally based expectations is harmed or threatened by relatives in order to protect the family’s social status and respectability.

In 2009, he and fellow Peoria detective Jeffrey Balson investigated the case of Noor Almaleki, a 20-year-old Arizona woman who was run over and killed by her father in order to, in her relatives’ eyes, protect her family’s honor.

Now, since dealing with Almaleki’s case, the two detectives have been brought on as law-enforcement liaisons by the AHA Foundation. Since joining forces with the group, Boughey and Balson get referrals to cases of forced marriage and honor violence nationwide. According to Boughey, law-enforcement officials often have no knowledge of the practice.

“I think law enforcement and social services don’t understand the notion of honor violence and/or forced marriage and they kind of check it off as a family problem that should be dealt with at the family level,” he said. “And that’s a huge mistake.”

Hiding behind tradition

Khalid Latif, imam and executive director at New York University’s Islamic Center, said that culture is often used as wrongful justification to force young Muslim girls to marry. For Latif, as a religious leader, this practice is morally incompatible with religious practices and mainly occurs because of precedents in communities.

“When somebody is getting married against their will, that is where it becomes religiously impermissible,” he said. “By no means is forced marriage sanctioned and allowed within Islam as a tradition.”

 Sarah Fournier

Latif counseled a young woman in New York City who every night, he said, “felt as if (she) was being raped” after she was forced to marry by her traditional Muslim family.

There can be severe psychological issues for victims, according to VOW’s McLeod, who is a survivor of domestic violence.

“A lot of times we see them being shunned because it is shameful not to be married,” she said. “It is shameful to leave your husband even if you are being abused. We have seen men who keep women constantly pregnant as a way to keep them controlled.”

McLeod said the U.S. needs better ways to educate women in communities at higher risk.

“Some of them learn their rights, go into shelters, and that’s when they begin the process of educating others,” she said. “It’s a really rampant thing that is really silent. These women are basically hostages until they can get themselves out.”

How to combat the issue

Sayoni Maitra is a legal fellow at Sanctuary for Families, a nonprofit agency in New York state that provides crisis intervention for victims of domestic violence, sex trafficking and forced marriage. Like Curtis and Boughey, Maitra agreed that the lack of legislation targeting forced marriage causes victims to fall through the cracks.

The U.S. lags behind other countries when it comes to recognizing forced marriage as an issue of violence against women, Maitra said. And many agencies and individuals could help but don’t get involved because they think of it as a cultural practice and not domestic violence.

Forced marriage often goes “hand in hand with other forms of gender violence,” she said. If the victim is under 18, it could be considered a form of child abuse. For victims over 18 years old, crimes associated with forced marriage include physical violence, marital rape, stalking, female genital mutilation — carried out in preparation for marriage — kidnapping and abduction.

“A lot of times, particularly with school-aged children, they are told right before their summer vacations they are going to go abroad to visit relatives and to learn about their parents’ home countries,” Maitra said. “She boards the plane, and when she arrives there, that’s when she realizes that she is going to be forced into marriage.”

She boards the plane, and when she arrives there, that’s when she realizes that she is going to be forced into marriage

Sayoni Maitra, Sanctuary for Families

Maitra, who works on an immigration project at Sanctuary for Families, cited various immigration remedies — U nonimmigrant status visas, T nonimmigrant status visas, VAWA self-petitions and asylum — for victims without green cards who are experiencing gender violence.

“The main thing is that forced marriage does not happen in isolation,” she said.

For victims like Fraidy Reiss who have found resources, there is hope that the cycle can be broken. Her 18-year-old daughter is in college and has a boyfriend. She has no plans to get married anytime soon, if at all.

“There is completely no pressure on her,” Reiss said. “She can get married. She can not get married. She can have children. She can never have children. She could get her Ph.D., or she could drop out of college. Whatever she wants, she can do. I’ve always told her, ‘There is nothing in the world that you can do that would make me consider you dead.’”

Unchained’s founder and executive director, Fraidy Reiss, was featured in December 2013 in “Jews on Bikes,” a documentary produced by Sky Atlantic in the U.K.

Here is Sky Atlantic’s description of the documentary: “This 6-part series for Sky Atlantic joins 8 British Jewish bikers as they embark on the ultimate road trip across America to discover their history and themselves. This unique, quirky and heart-warming series fuses Judaism with life on the road as our colourful characters unite with other Jewish biker clubs and meet a plethora of extraordinary people along the way.”

One of those “extraordinary people” was Fraidy Reiss, who was featured in the second episode of the documentary. She spoke to the bikers about her favorite topic, arranged/forced marriage, and how it happens in the Orthodox Jewish community. She and then-Unchained board member Elana Knopp shared with the bikers their personal experiences with abusive marriages arranged in that community.

Unchained tells the U.N.: U.S. Law Allows Forced/Child Marriage

Unchained is pleased to announce it has submitted a memo to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights about laws in the U.S. that easily allow parents to pressure, coerce or force children under the age of 18 into marriage.

The High Commissioner for Human Rights plans to  submit a report about child, early and forced marriage to the Human Rights Council in June 2014, and Unchained hopes the information it provided will be included in that report — as evidence that such marriages happen in the U.S., not only in Asia and Africa, and with Unchained’s recommendations for how to protect U.S. children from such marriages.

A Problem in the U.S. Too
Unchained’s memo to the High Commissioner noted that the U.S. has no legislation criminalizing forced marriage, and its laws surrounding the minimum marriage age easily allow for parents to pressure, coerce or force children under the age of 18 into marriage.

1. Conduct the first-ever nationwide study in the U.S. on how often children under age 18 have been and are getting married in the U.S. under the “parental consent” or “judicial approval” exceptions or under state law in Nebraska and Wyoming; and
2. Enact federal legislation or state-by-state legislation eliminating the two exceptions, raising the minimum marriage age in Nebraska and Wyoming, and establishing 18 as the minimum age to marry anywhere in the US.

World Policy Institute Presented

Unchained At Last: A Political Salon on Arranged Marriage

Featuring Kavitha Rajagopalan, Fraidy Reiss and Shehnaz Abdeljaber

WHEN: Tuesday, December 3
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

WHERE: World Policy Institute
108 West 39th Street, Suite 1000
New York City

Tens of thousands of women and girls in the United States – many as young as 15 years of age – are in arranged marriages, particularly in the Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, Sikh, South Asian, and African communities. Many of them have been coerced or forced into their situations, face domestic violence and lack the support and resources that would allow them to leave safely.

Coerced marriages are an under-reported problem that affect both U.S. citizens and migrant women, but they create an especially fragile situation for migrant women, who lack the legal protections, familiarity with the culture and law, and broader societal support that U.S. citizens have. Religious extremism both in the U.S. and abroad, as well as ostracism of migrants and religious minorities, have worsened the problem.

How does the U.S. compare to other countries in the world in dealing with this problem? What can be done to support women in coercive marriages?

World Policy Institute hosted Senior Fellow Kavitha Rajagopalan in conversation with Fraidy Reiss, the founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, who escaped an arranged marriage in a New Jersey Orthodox Jewish enclave, and Shehnaz Abdeljaber, board president of Unchained At Last, a Palestinian woman who took on her family and community to avoid an arranged marriage.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Shehnaz Abdeljaber grew up in a patriarchal community, where she fought to avoid ending up in an arranged marriage when she was 18. Her experiences turned her into a dedicated advocate for human rights, especially as they pertain to children and minorities. Shehnaz is President of the Board at Unchained At Last and serves as the outreach coordinator for the Rutgers University Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where she helps coordinate cultural and educational events involving the Arab and Muslim communities. She previously served on the Commission for New Americans under Governor Jon Corzine. Shehnaz is a graduate of Rutgers University. She is now a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, where she is pursuing a Master of Liberal Arts degree in Arab/South Asian women’s literature and creative writing.

Fraidy Reiss is the Founder and Executive Director of Unchained At Last, which helps women who want to leave their arranged marriage but are limited by finances, religious law and cultural norms. Fraidy was 19 when her family arranged for her to marry a man who turned out to be violent. But with no education and no job, and a family that refused to help her, she felt trapped. At age 27, Fraidy defied her husband and relatives to become the first person in her family to go to college; she graduated from Rutgers University at age 32 as valedictorian. With her degree in journalism, Fraidy reported for the Asbury Park Press, where her reporting won the second place New Jersey Press Association’s Robert P. Kelly Award for outstanding young journalists in 2007. Fraidy went on to a career as an investigator at Kroll, the world’s largest investigations firm, and then at a private firm in New York. Fraidy also serves on UJA-Federation’s Task Force on Family Violence.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Kavitha Rajagopalan is Secretary of the Board at Unchained At Last, a World Policy Institute Senior Fellow and author of Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West, a narrative nonfiction exploration of integration and identity formation in the urban Muslim diaspora. Her projects include research and advocacy on the causes and consequences of undocumented migration, arranged and forced marriage in America, urban informality and minority access to mainstream financial systems. She writes widely on global migration and diversity and has taught related courses at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs. She is a director at Kroll Advisory Solutions.

On November 17, 2013, Unchained At Last presented

BOUNTY OF LACE

The reading of a play about arranged marriage

Featuring Alysia Reiner and Michelle Hurst of “Orange Is the New Black”

Written by Susan Merson • 
Produced by the Jewish Plays Project

Followed by a panel discussion about arranged/forced marriage in the U.S.
At The Dillon, 425 W. 53 Street, New York City

ABOUT THE PLAY

A haredi mother, an Ethiopian professor and an American expatriate struggle to help a young Israeli woman secretly pregnant by a Palestinian man – but about to enter an arranged marriage with the rabbi’s son. Bounty of Lace explores the experience of women in a war-torn region dominated by male agendas.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

David Winitsky is the artistic director of the Jewish Plays Project, a collaborator with StorahTelling and a PresenTense New York City Fellow. He has directed or assisted on Broadway, off Broadway and regionally at Papermill Playhouse, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, California Shakespeare Festival and Philadelphia Theatre Company. David holds an MFA in directing from Northwestern University and a BA in mathematics from Cornell.

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

• Alysia Reiner (JUDITH) is an actress and producer, a mother and a humanitarian. She currently plays Natalie “Fig” Figueroa on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, and she has appeared in numerous other TV shows, including Blue Bloods, The Sopranos, 30 Rock and Law & Order (CI and SVU). She has appeared in such films as Sideways, which won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast, Kissing Jessica Stein and Primrose Lane. Alysia has appeared on stages around the world, including performances in Pentecost, An Oak Tree, which won a Special Obie Award, and Wasps In Bed. Alysia serves on the board of The Broad Collective and is involved with many charities dedicated to health, women and human rights.
• Michelle Hurst (KITZY) has had an extensive career in theatre, film and television, playing everything from judges and doctors to irate mothers, ghostly slaves and Henry James. Her film credits include Airheads, Sherrybaby and The Night We Never Met. She has performed at The Williamstown Theatre Festival, Long Wharf Theatre, NYSF/The Public Theater, Soho Rep, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and The Arts Center of Coastal Carolina, among others. Michelle’s television credits include major roles on The Good Wife and Blue Bloods, all three Law & Order shows and Sex and the City; currently, she plays Miss Claudette Pelage on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. Michelle also does voice-over work and narration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Susan Merson (GEULA) is an actress, writer, producer and educator who is not only a cast member; she also wrote Bounty of Lace. Susan is the founder/producing artistic director of New York Theatre Intensives and a writing teacher at California State University, Fullerton and at Sacred Center New York. She has appeared in the Broadway productions of Saturday Sunday Monday and Children of a Lesser God, and she co-created and appeared in the original off-Broadway production of Vanities. The plays she has written, including Hair: A Reminiscence, have been performed in the US and Canada, and her novels and fiction work have been published in various journals and anthologies.
• Jane Aquilina (SHARON) has been writing, performing and producing cabaret and stand up for more than a decade, appearing at Caroline’s, the Duplex, Broadway Comedy Club and the Metropolitan. Jane will be a featured singer in Off Broadway’s Sleep No More’s Valentine’s Day Cabaret. She also will star at the Duplex on February 14 with her partner in crime, Miss Robusta Capp, in Dirty Little Ditties. Jane is a member of Bizarre Noir Theatre Company and Carnival Girls Productions.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

• Kavitha Rajagopalan (Moderator) is a published author and policy analyst who was the first member of her family not to enter an arranged marriage. She serves as board secretary for Unchained At Last, as a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, where she writes and lectures widely on global migration, and  as a research director at a risk-consulting firm.  Kavitha is the author of Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West and she is a former journalist in the US, Germany and India. She was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and the John J. McCloy Journalism Award.
• Bushra Rehman is a poet, essayist and author. Her first novel, Corona, is a dark comedy about being South Asian in the United States; it was listed on this year’s Poets & Writers list of Best Debut Fiction. Bushra co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, which was included in Ms. Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time. Her writing has been featured in numerous anthologies and on BBC Radio, WNYC and KPFA and in The New York Times, India Currents, The Feminist Wire and Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America.
• Claire R. Thomas is a staff attorney at African Services Committee, where she advocates for African immigrant survivors of gender-based violence. She directs “Projet Aimée,” ASC’s empowerment group for survivors of gender-based violence. Claire is a member of the Immigration & Nationality Law Committee of the New York City Bar and chair of the Youth and Children subcommittee, as well as an adjunct member of the African Affairs Committee and co-chair of the Gender subcommittee. Claire has presented trainings on cultural competency to students and professionals in the US and abroad and has contributed articles on women’s rights to Perspectives on Global Issues and Women for Women International’s Critical Half journal.
• Shehnaz Abdeljaber is a dedicated advocate for human rights. She serves as the outreach coordinator for the Rutgers University Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where she helps coordinate cultural and educational events involving the Arab and Muslim communities, and as the volunteer outreach coordinator for the Global Literacy Project’s reading program, recruiting Rutgers University students to read to bilingual children at daycare centers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She also leads the Project’s backpack program, which supplies underprivileged children with school supplies. Shehnaz is currently a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, where she is pursuing a Master of Liberal Arts degree in Arab/South Asian women’s literature and creative writing.
• Fraidy Reiss is the founder/executive director of Unchained At Last. Fraidy was 19 when her family arranged for her to marry a violent man — but with no education and no job, she was trapped. Finally, at age 27, Fraidy defied her community to become the first person in her family to go to college; she graduated from Rutgers University at age 32 as valedictorian. She reported for the Asbury Park Press, winning the Robert P. Kelly Award for outstanding young journalists, second place, before she became a private investigator. Fraidy managed to get divorced and win full custody of her children, but she knows that most women who want to leave their arranged/forced marriages are limited by finances, religious laws and cultural norms. For them, Fraidy founded Unchained At Last.

GOLD SPONSORS

• Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP
• World Policy Institute
• Estanne Fawer
• Melina Spadone
• Kavitha Rajagopalan

SILVER SPONSORS

• Lisa Geevarughese
• Shehnaz Abdeljaber
• Walter Luers

SPECIAL THANK YOU

Unchained thanks the following people for making Bounty of Lace possible: Jeanne Gordon, Melina Spadone, David Winitsky, Susan Merson, Mark Berkley, Kelly Schultz and all of the sponsors, performers and panelists.

Newsweek describes how leaving an arranged  marriage in the Orthodox Jewish community can be “brutal, degrading and endless” for women — and talks about how Unchained helps such women, as well as women from any culture or religion that practices arranged/forced marriage.

Divorce in the Orthodox Jewish Community Can Be Brutal, Degrading and Endless

In the world of Orthodox Judaism, men hold all of the power when it comes to terminating marriages. Gital Dodelson, 25, knows this all too well.   Oli Scarff/Getty Images

“Only three days into the marriage, I knew I made a terrible mistake.”

Gital Dodelson, 25, wrote those words about her 2009 marriage to Avrohom Meir Weiss in an explosive essay in the New York Post last week.

After a short courtship and engagement (typical in the Orthodox Jewish community), Dodelson thought she had everything she wanted: the 400-person wedding, the lace dress, the white rose bouquet and, of course, Weiss, a Talmudic scholar from a prominent rabbinic family on Staten Island — until, she says, she discovered Weiss was “controlling and belittling.”

The marriage unraveled quickly.

“It was our first Shabbat together as man and wife — and it was spent in silence,” she wrote in the Post. According to Dodelson, Weiss controlled the family finances despite not having a job (he studied at his yeshiva full-time while she worked and went to school). She also claims he refused to hire a housekeeper when she was pregnant or see a marriage counselor, and got angry when she tried to pick her own doctor. After 10 months of marriage, Dodelson and her newborn son, Aryeh, moved in with her parents.

She divorced Weiss in civil court in August 2012, but says he refuses to give her a “get,” or religious divorce transaction necessary in Orthodox Judaism to finalize a divorce, leaving her unable to move on in her community.

Dodelson’s friends launched a website, SetGitalFree.com, to help publicize her situation. A Facebook page, Free Gital: Tell Avrohom Meir Weiss to Give His Wife a “Get,” has over 13,000 likes. Weiss’ side of the story, however, remains largely absent from media reports. Newsweek has been unable to reach Weiss or his family. However, Weiss’ father, Rabbi Yosaif Asher Weiss, spoke exclusively to the Staten Island Advance, saying: “Our family is horrified by the vitriol, lies and hate that permeate Gital’s article… This is a very, very heart-wrenching and ongoing dispute. We’ve been trying desperately to resolve this for a long time. This has destroyed my family health wise and destroyed my family financially.”

Dodelson’s story is not unique in the world of Orthodox Judaism, where men hold all of the power when it comes to terminating marriages.

According to Jewish law, a wife can refuse to accept a divorce initiated by her husband, but only a husband can initiate and finalize religious divorce proceedings. Even if a woman obtains a civil divorce, she is not considered divorced under Jewish law until her husband issues a get. Without it, she is deemed an agunah, a “chained wife” — she cannot date or remarry within the religious community in which she was raised, and any children she has with a new husband are deemed illegitimate. While a wife can sue for divorce in a beth din, a Jewish court, and while the beth din can order the husband to issue the get, he can still refuse. For some agunot, the situation can become so dire that they turn to violence. Recently, the FBI arrested a group of Brooklyn rabbis for running a for-hire torture ring that kidnapped and tormented Jewish husbands unwilling to provide their wives with gets.

“Being an agunah is such a painful and shameful existence,” says Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, a nonprofit that provides free legal services and support to women of any culture or religion trying to leave arranged or forced marriages. “You remain trapped as a single person in a community where there is nothing more shameful than being single.”

While there are plenty of cases in which Orthodox Jewish couples divorce without incident, for some husbands, refusing to offer a get is a way to control their wives — to extort money, to blackmail them for custody over children or, more simply, to punish them for wanting to end the marriage.

“I consider this to be the most pressing issue facing the Orthodox community in America,” says Rabbi Avi Weiss, the longtime leader of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in New York. “It’s an outrageous situation… If there is someone who is recalcitrant, they are not welcome — I have actually escorted such people out of my synagogue, which is so contrary to my work.”

“Get refusal is a form of domestic abuse, and domestic abuse is never justified,” says Rabbi Jeremy Stern, executive director of the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), a nonprofit in New York that helps husbands and wives secure gets amicably. Each year, ORA receives roughly 150 queries from women seeking guidance and assistance in divorcing their husbands. (In the first 36 hours after the Post story appeared, the group received a dozen phone calls.) “When dealing with contentious divorces, the first thing people say is, ‘There are two sides to every story.’ There are not two sides in abuse.”

ORA, which has handled around 500 controversial get cases since its founding in 2002, helped Dodelson organize two peaceful demonstrations outside of Weiss’ home on Staten Island, the first in June 2012 and the second a year later. The group’s tactics — a concoction of social, communal and financial pressures that involve ostracizing a husband from his community and publicizing his name online and in the media — assist women who are often unable to advocate for themselves.

“Get refusal is the last stand of men who want to hurt their wives. It’s the act of desperation: ‘You will never leave me,’” says Elana Maryles Sztokman, executive director of JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. “The moment of exit is the moment of greatest danger for abused women — it’s the moment when some abusive men will take out a violent weapon and try to kill their wives. In Judaism, men don’t need to take out a gun. They can take out a get and say, ‘I will own you forever.’”

While it’s often challenging to track statistics on divorce within the Orthodox Jewish community, a 2011 study by the Mellman Group reported 462 cases of agunot in the U.S. and Canada between 2005 and 2010, suggesting a marked increase in get refusals as well as a decline in resolutions, which can take anywhere from one to five years, sometimes longer. Most of these agunot were young women with children and limited finances, trying to escape first marriages without resources or assistance. In Israel, one in three women seeking divorce is threatened with a get refusal or extortion from her husband, according to a 2013 study by Bar-Ilan University’s Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women. Among the religious and ultra Orthodox community in Israel, that number jumps to one in every two women.

Dodelson’s decision to go public with her situation is rare for the largely private Orthodox Jewish community.

“I don’t agree with people living their lives out in the public eye like this, and using publicity to get something without everyone knowing all of the facts,” says HaDassah Sabo Milner, 40, a blogger for the Times of Israel. “You’ve got to think of the child. He’ll grow up and read vitriolic posts by each camp. He’s an innocent in all of this,” she says, adding, “I understand she’s totally desperate, and I get that, but at the end of the day, the husband has to give his divorce of his own free will.”

Milner was 32 years old and had four young children when her first marriage ended in divorce. “I was very fortunate that my ex-husband did not give me a hard time. Our marriage was over and we got it done,” she explains. But that didn’t make the experience easy. She criticizes the male-dominated divorce process as well as the men who use gets to their advantage; “withholding a get is abuse,” she says.

Not everyone in the Orthodox Jewish world criticizes Dodelson’s public plea.

“It took such guts for her to write what she did,” says Reiss, 38, who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn. When she was 19 years old, her parents arranged for her to marry a man she’d never met. By 27, she was unhappy and wanted out — not just of the marriage, but of the entire Orthodox Jewish world.

“I had no education and no job, and I had two kids. I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t support them or myself. I was trapped,” she says.

Reiss became the first person in her family to go to college (she graduated from Rutgers in 2007, at the age of 32). When she stopped wearing a head covering during her senior year, she says her family declared her dead. “One of my sisters told me that my [parents, two other sisters and two brothers] were discussing whether to sit shiva for me,” she says. “And I was valedictorian.”

Reiss made the rare decision to not only file for divorce in civil court, rather than religious court, but she also refused to accept a get from her husband. “Normally, women beg and have to pay money,” Reiss explains. “For a while I had rabbis calling me begging me to accept the get. They didn’t know what to do with me.”

Reiss, who now lives in in a non-Jewish suburb of New Jersey and sends her children to public school, chose to leave the Orthodox community, making it easier for her to move on with her life without a get. As she put it, “I knew I would never want to remarry in that community.” Women like Dodelson, who don’t want to sacrifice their faith for their freedom, face a harder road.

Orthodox Judaism is replete with the vestiges of bronze-age patriarchy, and change in the community takes time and consensus.

“We’ve come a long way. In some respects, Orthodox Judaism is still more progressive than fundamental religions,” says Eliyahu Fink, an Orthodox rabbi who leads the Pacific Jewish Center in Venice, Calif., referring to the fact that Orthodox Jewish women now go to graduate school and become doctors, lawyers, teachers — pretty much anything but rabbis. Still, this is a community struggling to figure out how to continue its traditions and existence in today’s high-tech, Internet-saturated, modern world.

In May 2012, around 40,000 ultra-Orthodox Jewish men gathered at a religious rally at New York’s Citi Field to protest the dangers of the Internet. (Viewings were organized in Brooklyn and New Jersey neighborhoods so that women could participate remotely, separate from the men as per ultra-Orthodox tradition.) Just over a year later, the retail chain Rami Levy announced a “kosher” smartphone for the ultra-Orthodox community, complete with phone, text and email capabilities, access to pre-approved apps and limited web access (there is no Google). Recently, a Hasidic community in Brooklyn expressed outrage over the city’s new bike lanes, which brought “scantily clad” women riding through their neighborhood. This June, an Orthodox rabbinical school in New York made history by ordaining three women as halachic and spiritual leaders, called maharats (women are not permitted to be rabbis in the Orthodox community).

Divorce, however, remains the man’s prerogative. “If you’re causing someone pain — emotional, physical, sexual — that’s forbidden in the Torah,” Fink says. “If the person uses the law as a weapon, that is violating Jewish law.”

“[Progress] can’t just be about galvanizing protests for a particular person, but rather about making sure the next 500 people don’t go through this particular horror,” explains Michael Helfand, an associate professor at Pepperdine Law School and associate director of Pepperdine’s Glazer Institute for Jewish Studies.

One sign of hope for Orthodox women comes in the form of a halachic prenup, which is civilly enforceable in America and creates a financial disincentive for husbands to withhold gets.

“I will not do a wedding today without a prenuptial being signed,” says Avi Weiss, who has been using prenuptial agreements since 1983. “It’s irresponsible for any rabbi to do a wedding without one… It is the deepest expression of love: I love you so much, I want to protect you in any eventuality. If ever I am out of control, I want to make sure you are still protected.”

“We have never seen a case where a halachic prenup was properly signed and the get was withheld,” Stern says. “We need to standardize the use of the halachic prenup agreement,” he added. “It is a vaccine for the Jewish community.”

While the prenup may be an effective troubleshooting tool, it is not a solution to the endemic problem of women’s rights in Orthodox Jewish marriage and divorce proceedings. Indeed, over three years later, Dodelson still awaits her freedom from Weiss.

“I’m waiting for the email to say that Avrohom gave her the get,” says Shira Dicker, the publicist behind Dodelson’s Post article. “If we succeed here, we will have used a 21st century solution — Facebook, social media, the media — to combat a centuries-old law that is really in need of change.”

Girls are being told to hide a metal spoon in their suitcase when they are being sent overseas and forced into marriage. That way their suitcases will set off metal detectors and compel airport security to pull them off to the side, away from their parents, where they can ask for help. This story includes mention of Unchained At Last.