The following story in the Indianapolis Star includes quotes from Unchained At Last, the only nonprofit in the US dedicated to helping women leave arranged/forced marriages.
The woman from India came to Indiana to visit family. Shortly after arriving, she discovered her mother had arranged her marriage, a not-uncommon practice in their culture.
But this marriage would turn into a violent and degrading four-month ordeal.
She was forced to have sex with her husband and do nearly round-the-clock household labor, police say. She was routinely referred to as “b—-” by her husband, uncle and aunt; and slapped and choked. Her life was threatened.
She barely ate and had to sleep on the floor without covers.
But this week, the woman will get some measure of relief when her husband, Lakhvir Singh, 28, is sentenced in Marion County Superior Court.
“I want the maximum punishment and justice to be served,” the woman told The Indianapolis Star. The Star does not generally identify victims of sexual abuse or assault. “I don’t want this to happen to any other girl. My voice can finally be heard.”
A week ago, a jury found Singh guilty of criminal deviate conduct, domestic battery, rape, sexual battery and strangulation.
Singh was found not guilty of another charge: promotion of human trafficking. He also was acquitted on separate counts of rape, deviate sexual misconduct and sexual battery.
His sentencing is scheduled for Friday, and he faces six to 20 years in prison for the most serious charges.
Singh’s lawyer, Jack Crawford, says the woman made up the allegations to get out of a marriage she didn’t like and to secure a visa for victims of human trafficking.
“She was in a marriage where she did some things she didn’t want to do and tried to get out of it,” Crawford said. “The blame here lies with the parents for forcing them both into a marriage they did not want.”
But the victim’s brother says she has the emotional and physical scars to prove the allegations.
“She is finally getting her confidence back, but it will take a long time,” said her brother, who called police when he found out about the abuse. The Star is not naming the brother to help further protect her identity.
“She had to repeat the experience at the trial, so it will be sometime before she is normal.”
Marriage a surprise
The brother was a graduate student at Purdue University when the woman came with their mother from India to visit him in May 2010.
But shortly after arriving, her mother told her she had arranged a marriage with Singh, who then lived in New Castle, Ind., said Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Detective Jon Daggy.
“That is something in the culture you don’t go against the mother’s wishes about,” Daggy said.
The couple later moved to an apartment in Indianapolis. No certificate of marriage was ever filed with the State of Indiana, according to a probable cause document filed with Marion Superior Court. A religious ceremony, however, occurred at a Sikh temple in Indianapolis.
Cheryl Thomas, director of the women’s rights program at Advocates for Human Rights, a national nonprofit based in Minneapolis, said arranged marriages can be dangerous.
“This is a problem in many countries where women are forced into marriages that they don’t want to be in,” she said. “They’re vulnerable, particularly if they don’t have any education or access to employment that can give them some independence.
Once she moved into Singh’s home, the woman “never felt like a wife but was made a servant” against her will, Daggy wrote in the probable cause affidavit. She often worked from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m., police said, attending to members of Singh’s family, such as an aunt, uncle and cousins who often stayed at the apartment. She prepared multiple meals per day, police said, and was required to clean all rooms of the home each day. She also did laundry for Singh and his relatives.
Singh and his family members did not call the woman by her name, the document states, but rather referred to her as “kutt” — a Punjabi word for “b—-.”
Singh threatened to kill the woman if she left his home, police said, and discouraged her from contact with the outside world. The woman does not speak English.
The woman was denied the privileges she provided others, police said. She was ordered to use detergent for washing Singh’s and his relatives’ clothing but not to use it for her own, the document states. She was forced to sleep on the floor rather than on a bed or couch, she told police, and was not even given her own blanket.
Singh regularly beat the woman, the detective wrote, when she sought to avoid having sex with him and whenever he became upset with the quality of her household work.
Unpaid servitude
Singh’s lawyer, Crawford, said the victim was able to get a T-visa, which is good for four years, because she lodged the human trafficking complaint.
But he said the jury acquitted on the human trafficking charge because they “they didn’t believe she was forced into servitude.”
“The statute says you must harbor in a condition of forced labor and involuntary servitude,” Crawford said. “But that was not the case.”
Singh did allow the woman to talk to relatives by phone, the document states, but tried to control what she told them. One of the first occasions of physical abuse, she told police, was when Singh slapped and choked her after hearing her tell her mother about her living conditions.
It was a conversation with a relative, however, that finally allowed the woman to win her escape from Singh. Seeing a phone on a couch while Singh was in a bathroom, the document states, the woman called her brother for help. Her brother called 911, the document states, and asked that police check on his sister’s welfare.
Police arranged for the woman to move to a secure location away from Singh, the document states, as they investigated her allegations.
The prosecutor’s office filed charges against Singh on Feb. 8, 2012, after a months-long investigation.
The victim’s brother says she told him her doubts about Singh early on, but he was so consumed with school at the time he didn’t heed the warnings. She told him that her future husband had acted like a “bully” on the phone.
“I now regret it,” he said. “I should have raised my voice against my mother.”
Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that helps women forced into arranged marriages, says the practice can present risks.
“Women who are brought to the U.S. as part of an arranged marriage think they are going to have a great life when they get here. But in some cases, they’re physically, sexually and emotionally abused,” she said. “They’re treated as slaves. They’re unpaid servants.”
“By no means am I saying that all arranged marriages are abusive,” Reiss said. “What I am saying is that it is much more difficult to leave an arranged marriage.”
Unchained’s first legislative proposal, to protect domestic violence victims, has been introduced in the New Jersey legislature as S2790/A3937. Please help get this important legislation passed. Details here.
“I believed he was going to kill me. He would tell me in detail exactly how he was going to do it,” Reiss said as she sat on a green leather couch in her New Jersey home, while her two teenage daughters ran in and out of the room. “He used to joke and say, ‘I’m not a wife beater, I’m a house beater,’ as if that were OK.”
Reiss said it wasn’t until speaking with a therapist outside of her community years later, that she realized this was domestic violence. After their meeting, she defied everyone she knew by enrolling in classes at Rutgers University. She shed her conservative clothing, took her two daughters, and filed for divorce.
Today, nearly 20 years later, she’s dedicated her life to helping others follow in her path. She started Unchained at Last, a nonprofit organization that helps women from New York and New Jersey — across all cultures and backgrounds — leave arranged marriages.
The group has been operational for over a year, and has over 45 divorce cases pending. According to Reiss, 70 percent of the clients are from the Orthodox Jewish community.
“I see Jewish women stay in abusive marriages because often times divorce is considered much too shameful,” Reiss said.
New York City’s five boroughs and parts of New Jersey are home to the greatest concentration of Jewish people of any metropolitan area in the United States, according to a study by the UJA-Federation of New York. And, unlike a decade ago, this population is growing: Nearly half a million Jewish people live in Orthodox households, with significantly larger families, and somewhat lower incomes.
Like Reiss, many women in these Diaspora communities feel there is an expectation to be married by age 20, though they may feel it might not be right for them. For men, the average age is 23, according to Yitzhak Berger, lead professor of Hebrew Studies at the City University of New York’s Hunter College.
Berger said there is a significantly higher amount of young girls in the community than boys, with the pools getting larger every three to four years.
“Because there are so many more girls, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure that they will be left standing,” Berger said.
In addition, Reiss said the women can also feel pressure by the matchmaker to not be the “picky girl,” they don’t want to deal with. Her ex-husband was her second match, and she already had the feeling of being a burden.
But Rachel Garfinkle, 29, a Jewish matchmaker who lived in Lakewood, New Jersey, the same town as Reiss lived after she got married, said she has never pressured a woman to marry, especially if she thought the potential groom was abusive.
“I will always tell someone, ‘If you don’t feel good about the match, talk it over with our rabbi or an advisor,’” Garfinkle said. “Most of my friends and siblings turned down the first match they were set up with.”
Aside from the struggles a woman might face when entering a marriage, there are also pressures when trying to leave it. By Jewish law, only men have the power to end a marriage by giving his wife a decree of divorce, known as a get.
If the man refuses to give his wife a religious divorce, she cannot marry again. This leaves her in a state of limbo, marking her as an agunah, or a “chained woman.” In Israel, a man can be thrown in jail for denying a get, but in the US, there is no such law.
Over the past five years, there were 450 cases of divorce refusals by men in the US and Canada, according to a 2011 study by the Mellman Group.
Knowing this, Reiss combatted the problem by getting a civil divorce, completely skipping religious courts, called the Beit Din. She is an Atheist now, but said many of her clients are not willing to part with their Jewish heritage.
Elana Sztokman, executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, said the group’s top issue is fighting the agunah problem. Sztokman said she is surprised there aren’t more people taking the same route as Reiss.
“Rabbis should be terrified, we are losing women,” she said. “They should be spending every minute trying to find a solution to the agunah.”
The organization feels the best solution would be to have the Beit Din courts introduce forms of annulment, where a woman can declare the union void based on an error in the creation of the marriage. Meaning, if she had she known he was violent or manipulative, she never would have married him.
In the future, Reiss hopes to turn her group into a national organization. In April, Unchained at Last got its first big break, with the successful divorce of their first client, a Pakistani woman from the Bronx.
Even though Reiss said she feels her life is complete without religion, severing ties with her entire family was not taken lightly.
“There are a lot of times that it’s just incredibly sad and painful for me that I’m so alone in this world,” Reiss said as she gazed around the room at the home she bought completely on her own. “But when it’s 90 degrees outside and my daughters can wear a pair of shorts and a tank top, they say, ‘Thank you Mommy.’”
