Topline Findings (Click here for the Yiddish version)

Recently researchers at Columbia University, led by Prof. Jennifer S. Hirsch, partnered with the nonprofit organization Unchained At Last, led by Fraidy Reiss, on a project called MOVE (Marriage, Orthodoxy and a Vision of Empowerment), to explore and challenge dominant understandings of forced marriage, forced marital sex and forced parenthood.

The MOVE team interviewed dozens of people who married in the haredi community in the New York City area, to collect stories that reflect the breadth of marital experiences. The interviewees included both men and women, some who were still married and some who had gotten divorced, and some who were still frum and some who were not. The MOVE team also consulted with more than 20 experts and spent time in the community.

Some people describe marriages, lives and experiences in the community in positive terms, while others describe coercion and trauma. We focus below on five of MOVE’s most important findings about coercion and trauma:

1. People in the haredi community have little choice about whether, when and whom to marry, and whether to leave a marriage.

• • No one reported feeling self-determination in relation to whether to marry. Marriage is an expected life course step, the only path to adulthood, and the only way to leave one’s parents’ home.
  • Some people manage to delay when they marry, but only within a narrow window.
  • Young age at marriage and the fast-paced shidduch system can inhibit the choice of whom to marry. Further, people with socially desirable characteristics may have access to multiple matches with socially desirable characteristics, but people with marks against them may have few or no viable matches. Many interviewees who were considered “low value” on the shidduch market described being matched with individuals who had hidden, untreated mental illness, with disastrous consequences. 
  • A key element of what people experience as “forced marriage” is barriers to marital exit, which include gett refusal, the shame and stigma of divorce, the acrimony that inevitably comes with divorce, fear of losing one’s children or harming their shidduch prospects, financial dependence, and pressure from family, rabbis, frum therapists and others to stay in a marriage, even if it is abusive.

2. As is true in many communities, people feel socially produced shame about sex. What is distinctive about this context is the strict limits on conversation about or access to knowledge about sex, combined with rigid expectations for when married people will have sex. Many interviewees (notably, even some who ended up being happy in their marriage) described feeling traumatized by the “0 to 60” transition from never talking about sex or touching a member of the opposite sex to going to the mikvah and having sex on their wedding night with someone they barely knew. 

• • Some interviewees reported being taught in kallah or chosson classes that women may not say no to sex. Not a single interviewee reported any discussion in kallah or chosson classes of the possibility that men might not want to have sex. 

3. People perceive having children as both a mitzvah and a highly valued social activity. Most feel they are expected to have a child in the first year of marriage and to have large families, with little regard to the health risks of short birth intervals and no regard for their personal preferences. 

• • Most participants reported having limited knowledge about or access to birth control.

4. Although conversations about coercion in marriage, sex and reproduction tend to focus on women’s experiences, heterosexual men (both frum and not) also experience constraints on marital, sexual, and reproductive self-determination.

• • Interviewees who are LGBTQ found the requirement to marry and to have regular marital sex particularly burdensome.

5. Suffering in relation to marital, sexual and reproductive coercion and the acrimonious divorce process is driving some people to leave the frum community – including those who otherwise would have remained within it.