This is part two of a four-part series.

Fraidy Reiss had been married only a week when she realized she was trapped in a nightmare. That morning, her husband flew into a rage after waking up late and punched his fist through a wall of Sheetrock in their apartment. He was twice her size. She was 19.

And she wondered, “If he could do that to the wall, what could he do to me?”

Nearly two decades later, Reiss recounted her experience for a recent World Policy Institute salonon forced marriage in the United States. Now 37, Reiss told the participants: “I was in fear of my life.”

Reiss grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn and her marriage was arranged by a matchmaker, as is the custom, while she was still a teenager. Birth control is forbidden in the Orthodox world, so she soon had two daughters. Although the marriage was not technically forced, Reiss said she felt under intense societal and familial pressure to enter into it. Soon after the wall-punching incident, when her husband began threatening her and she reached out to the community for support, the same pressures were doubled up to stop her from leaving.

“There was no help, no understanding of domestic violence and no encouragement to get out,” she said. “My daughters and I were on our own.”

The violence got worse until eventually she could take it no more and, in a gesture of defiance toward the religious community that had failed her, she bundled her two daughters into a car and drove away on the Sabbath.

The intense and lonely struggle that followed to get a divorce and custody of her children prompted her to found Unchained at Last, a group dedicated to helping other women un-arrange their marriages and rearrange their lives.

It’s not entirely clear how prevalent arranged marriages are in the United States or how frequently marriages that are arranged cross the line into being forced. A 2011 survey conducted by theTahirih Justice Center (TJC), a Virginia-based advocacy group, identified nearly 3,000 cases of forced marriage in the previous two years among immigrant communities from 56 different countries.

Unlike in the United Kingdom, however, which passed the Forced Marriage Act in 2008, the United States has no corresponding law to protect women. Advocates say that excessive cultural sensitivity plays an enabling role as well. “With respect to forced marriage in the U.S. today, we’re back where we were with domestic violence 30 years ago,” said Jeanne Smoot, the TJC’s director of public policy, “just as the problem was hidden from view because it was considered a private family matter, forced marriage hides behind a cultural and religious curtain.”

Many of the nearly 70 clients that Unchained is serving in New York and New Jersey are from Muslim and Hindu backgrounds, and the majority are from the Orthodox Jewish community that Reiss had to flee. (“When Orthodox women complain to rabbis about their marriages, they warn them about me,” she said, laughing. “The next day they are on the phone!”)

While the women’s backgrounds vary, they share many traits. They usually were married as teenagers, have had little access to education, have not been allowed to work and are at the mercy of their communities and the husbands who were set up to dominate them. Most are victims of domestic violence.

Navigating legal system

“I had no idea how things were going to turn out, no idea how to navigate the legal system, no idea how to survive,” said one of Unchained’s clients, Sarah Altman (a pseudonym), recalling the terror of having to flee to a domestic-violence shelter with her children and less than $20 in her pocket. Her biggest concern, after having been shunned by her family and community, was losing custody of her children.

Marc Lieberstein, a New York-based attorney who offers his services pro bono to Unchained’s clients, said custody can be an especially tricky issue for women leaving arranged marriages. “The courts have to consider what’s in the best interest of the child,” he said, “in a case where a mother has to leave a community or a religion, a judge may decide it’s better for the child to stay with the extended family.”

Altman is still waiting for her divorce and custody arrangement to be finalized, partly because of complications of religious law. Under Orthodox Jewish law, a woman cannot commence a divorce action, and even if she manages to obtain a divorce in a civil court, it has to be approved by theBeth Din, a rabbinical court system. Her husband then has to sign a get, a religious decree, before the divorce it is recognized by her community and family, and they are not always willing to do so.

In some cases, religious law can work in a woman’s favor. Arranged marriages are commonplace in Muslim communities, but it is strictly forbidden in Islam to force a woman into marriage.

“Before a woman gets married, the imam has to take her aside and ask if she is being forced,” said Shehnaz Abdeljaber, a Palestinian-American who is president of the board at Unchained. Abdeljaber’s family arranged a marriage to her cousin when she was just 18. When she told her father that if she went through with the marriage, it would be forced, he relented, and she was allowed to break off the engagement.

Not all families in Muslim and other communities are as considerate, however, and many girls who resist marriages are subject to violence and even death threats. Almost half the respondents to theTJC survey reported that forced-marriage victims had been subjected to physical violence, and 13 respondents reported murder attempts.

Unchained is advocating for new laws to protect women from being coerced into marriages, as well as for changes to existing laws such as those surrounding minimum marriage age, and to religious laws that are sometimes enforceable in civil court. In many states, girls as young as 16 can be married, as long as there is parental or judicial consent, and in three states — California, Delaware and Mississippi — there is no minimum age limit whatsoever. Unchained has introduced its first legislative proposal to the New Jersey Legislature to make it easier for domestic-violence victims to get a final restraining order against their abusers. In the meantime, building a community to replace the one the women have lost is a priority.

“When I left my marriage, my family sat shiva for me,” Reiss said, referring to the Jewish mourning ritual after a person has died. “I know how painful it is to lose everyone you know and love.”

But, she added, there is no turning back.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.’”