Sakina Muhammad Jan is the first person in Australia to be jailed over its forced marriage laws.

A mother has become the first person to be jailed under Australia’s forced marriage laws, for ordering her daughter to wed a man who would later murder the 21-year-old.

Sakina Muhammad Jan, who is in her late 40s, was found guilty of coercing Ruqia Haidari to marry 26-year-old Mohammad Ali Halimi in 2019, in exchange for a small payment.

Six weeks after the nuptials, Halimi killed his new bride - a crime for which he is now serving a life sentence.

On Monday, Jan - who pleaded not guilty - was sentenced to at least a year in jail, for what a judge called the “intolerable pressure” she had placed on her daughter.

  • @gedaliyahEnglish
    -4•5 months ago

    As a practice, it is far more common in south and Central Asia and Africa, and is more culturally significant in those places. However, I was wrong to equate arranged marriage and forced marriage. Australian law makes that distinction, and research supports it.

    “while forced marriage is not a product of any ethnic, racial or religious affiliation, certain cultural approaches and sensitivities should be employed when identifying forced marriage… Academic literature critiques the tendency to box forced marriage as a problem within new-migrant communities” (Source)[https://fecca.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FECCA-Literature-Review-on-Forced-Marriages.pdf]