‘Excuse me. I’ve killed my wife’: The ongoing menace of forced marriage in Australia

This story is part of the May 31 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

Before escaping out the window, Miriam* waits for her parents to doze off. She tries to calm herself and sends a string of texts to Bec, an acquaintance waiting outside in a car on an ordinary Melbourne street. “It must be tonight.” It is late 2020 and Miriam is just days away from her wedding. The sari is picked, the gold jewellery bought. The 19-year-old’s proud parents will soon welcome hundreds of guests, many from overseas. The only problem is that Miriam has no intention of getting married.

She’s spent the last month quietly chipping at the glue her parents used to jam her window. This is one way they kept her from running away. Miriam was also locked in her bedroom, sometimes for days without food.

But this treatment had not been the final trigger that led her to contact Bec*, an artist who’d randomly stumbled into a cluster of forced-marriage cases in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. It hadn’t been her father’s beatings with a curtain rod, either. Or her mother’s painful clawing at her face. It wasn’t that her brother enjoyed freedoms denied to her, like leaving unaccompanied from the house. And it wasn’t even the strange men – often several decades older – her parents had introduced as potential husbands since she was 12.

Miriam was so sheltered – confined to her Islamic private school and home – that she had no idea her parents’ abuse was wrong. “They were the only love I knew,” she says. It was only when her mother said she’d treat any future daughter of Miriam’s the same that something snapped. “That’s what broke me. I decided this ends with me.”

Miriam was facing a forced marriage, made illegal in Australia in 2013. Forced marriage, which has an element of coercion, threat, deception or incapacity, is often confused with arranged marriage, in which both parties may be strangers but willingly consent. Last year, the Australian Federal Police dealt with 91 forced-marriage cases, but that’s thought to be a small fraction of the actual number. The victims are often young – 56 per cent of the AFP’s recent cases were children 17 or under – and are referred to police and support programs by high schools, legal centres, family violence services, community organisations and university staff (often because a woman is prolonging study to avoid marriage). It impacts mostly young women and girls. Panos Massouris, who runs a national forced-marriage support program at the not-for-profit service Life Without Barriers, says about 20 per cent of his clients are male (some subjected to violence, but most under huge pressure to marry to maintain family “honour”). “It’s in no specific religion and no one culture,” he says.

Last year, the federal government significantly changed its approach to forced marriage. Since 2013, victims could only get help if they engaged with the AFP. But, as experts and social workers repeatedly warned, most victims did not want to dob in their parents to police and may have avoided seeking help. There are now new support options that do not require involvement with the criminal justice system. “We’ve been shocked by the number of people calling us,” says Massouris, whose program is one of the new options and sees four new cases weekly.

Bec had no idea about forced marriage until she started a community art project with colleagues in Melbourne’s north. A cafe worker, Fatima*, participated in the project and later revealed she was about to be forced into a marriage in Afghanistan. Bec arranged to pick up Fatima one night while her family was sleeping. Then Fatima, who ended up moving interstate, put schoolmate Khadija* in touch. Bec and her colleagues arranged her escape, too. And, finally, Khadija put Bec in touch with Miriam. “We somehow discovered this shocking thing was going on just 20 minutes from the Melbourne CBD,” says Bec. “We couldn’t believe women were treated like this in these incredibly outdated and conservative communities. I feel like we only just touched the surface of how bad it is.”

Text messages between Bec* and Miriam* on the night she escaped.

In her bedroom, Miriam practises her deep breathing. Has she got her passport? Check. “Just a few more [minutes],” she texts Bec at 11.56pm. Then at 12.11am she’s finally ready. “Alright imma pop the window now.” She climbs out and leaves for good.

Escape to a safe house

From the outside, the Lighthouse Foundation safe house seems like a normal home in a nice Melbourne suburb. But inside, behind the high fence and robust security system, it’s like a cocoon for women and girls fleeing or avoiding a forced marriage. They leave transformed, undergoing a complete life rebuild. To keep themselves safe, they’ve let go of everything: family, friends, community. And sometimes, because they’ve lived such confined lives, they need to learn the simplest of skills such as catching a tram and using money.

This home for forced-marriage victims is a one of a kind in Victoria (there are two similar safe houses in NSW). It houses up to six females, aged between 16 and 25, who stay for as long as they need, usually two years. Therapeutically trained staff help residents recover, while volunteers create a sense of community by dining monthly with the women and girls, especially on special religious occasions. The initiative, called the Young Women’s Freedom Program, gets no government funding. “We rely year-to-year on philanthropy to do this vital work,” says program leader Haylee Lawrence-Simons, who gives me a tour of the impeccably neat house. “But it means we can’t plan long-term or meet the rising need.”

This is where I first meet Miriam. She left the safe house in 2023 but has returned to talk to me about her experience. Over mineral water and carrot cake, Miriam, who is tall and has her black hair pulled back, says she came to Australia from Asia when she was seven. She was kept out of primary school and never homeschooled. Her parents started introducing potential husbands when she got her first period. This was, she says, mostly about her father building business alliances. The first man they introduced, when she was 12, told her parents Miriam wasn’t educated enough. So her parents organised for her to become a hafiza, a woman who learns the prized skill of memorising the Quran. They finally allowed her to go to a private Islamic high school in year 10.

The words tumble out of Miriam in rapid fire. She speaks about her school which, though private, receives a majority of its funding from federal and state governments. There was no talk of careers for the girls, she says. Information about the reproductive system was cut from science books. “They were saying to us that, as girls, we must listen to our fathers and the husbands. That’s our only path … There was no concept of having your own self, your own worth, your own freedom, your own speech, your own opinion. Nothing like that.” But Miriam knew every word of the Quran and sometimes peeked at alternative English translations. She knew her school’s interpretation of a woman’s role was a perversion of her faith. “They were saying those things are all Islam, that’s what it’s like for women. But it’s not like that in Islam, it really isn’t.”

She finished her Victorian Certificate of Education but her father refused to reveal the result. Two more proposals followed and then fell away. Her parents confined her for longer periods, put more locks on the door and glued the window shut. “Every time a proposal fell through it became more intense at home, more beatings, more boundaries,” she says.

I ask Miriam if the mufti and community knew she didn’t want to go through with the wedding she escaped from. Do they know forced marriage is illegal? “Of course they definitely had knowledge that it was illegal,” says Miriam. “Everyone, the aunties and uncles – we call [the community members] aunties and uncles – they were aware of what was going on. They were OK with it. They weren’t like that with their own daughters. It was just a select group of girls going through this.”

Globally, an estimated 22 million people are stuck in forced marriages.

During her two-year stay in the safe house, Miriam learnt to socialise and make friends. “I learnt how to love. I learnt how to be cared for. We [grew up being] taught that it was not OK to be loved and not OK to show emotion. But at Lighthouse it was different, they cared for me, loved me as a stranger, treated me as their own. Within one year, I got the foundation I missed out on in my childhood – what it means to be human, what’s right and wrong, also a sense of justice I never knew existed. Then finding out about things like taxes and how the world runs! I learnt it all from here.”

Violent ice addict

I meet another forced-marriage victim at the Lighthouse safe house: Adara*. She’s a delightful 19-year-old with a wide smile and dark eyes. She wears a mauve headscarf and a black jacket over a T-shirt. Adara, from a war-torn Middle Eastern country, agreed to marry a second cousin and came to Australia early last year. “When I come to Australia I want to make beautiful families,” she tells me. But the marriage turned out to be anything but beautiful.

Her now ex-husband, a construction worker, appeared to be a good Muslim man, Adara says, but was actually an ice and gambling addict. She had virtually no English – she speaks haltingly, often translating words using her phone – and was living an isolated life in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. “He say: ‘No, you just stay home. I don’t want [you to] go outside.’ I say: ‘I will learn. Teach me. How can I use bus?’ ”

The drug-taking worsened. One day when he was being violent, she called a relative and escaped by running to their car outside. They took her to the police, who organised a motel room as crisis accommodation. The Arabic-speaking taxi driver who picked her up from the police station soothed her and opened the motel door (she had no idea how to use the plastic key card). “I’m crying in the taxi. I don’t know any people. I don’t know anything. I am so sad.” After moving to the Lighthouse safe house, Adara is now working in a cafe, learning English and wants to study nursing. She’s had to change her number three times to evade her ex, who also hacked her old Facebook profile. She thinks he has backed off. “Maybe he understand now,” she says.

Marked as property

Last month, outside a casual sushi restaurant in inner Melbourne, I meet Khadija, one of the other young women Bec helped escape. She’s small and wrapped up in a black jacket, her fawn headscarf secured with white pins. She wears clear plastic glasses, and it’s quickly apparent how whip-smart and funny she is.

From the time Khadija got her first period, at 14, her parents told her that she had to marry a close family friend, several years older, who lived in her birth country, Syria (she came to Australia in 2005, aged seven). His family, says Khadija, wanted to cash in on her father’s good name and relative wealth as an Australian resident and obtain a visa for their son. Her parents wanted to help this family and avoid the dishonour of an unmarried daughter.

Khadija said no, unequivocally. “I was thinking about going to school, soccer, girls, boys, songs, anything – anything! – and not marriage.” Like Miriam, her life consisted only of school and home. She was isolated, denied a mobile phone and monitored closely. But every few years, the family would go back to Syria and she would see this man. On one visit he came into her room, beat her and bit her arm, leaving gouges. “He said: ‘I have marked you now – you are completely mine.’ ” His family spread the rumour that he’d attacked her, ruined her honour and she could be with no one but him. Meanwhile, her designated future mother-in-law taught Khadija how to do wifely chores.

In late 2018, her father announced that they needed to return to Syria because of an ailing relative. Khadija was there for five months, under constant pressure to marry the man. “That was every day: physical, mental, psychological, every kind of abuse possible, except sexual,” she tells me over miso and raw fish. “My parents took my passport, they took my visa, my ID documents, any kind of money I had. They basically took hostage of me.” Meanwhile, her VCE studies suffered: she missed months of school and was banned from using the internet.

‘I worry one of them will want to protect the family’s honour and will one day come back.’

Khadija*

Eventually, her parents allowed her to return to Melbourne, though the pressure continued. Khadija immediately started plotting her escape. She squirrelled away money. She ferried her belongings in small bags to school and handed them to a friend. Then one day, when she was looking at social media, she spotted a former schoolmate whose posts had suddenly taken on a new vibe. This young woman seemed, says Khadija, to be “out and about” in the world. It turned out to be Fatima, the first young woman Bec had helped. Khadija asked for Bec’s contact and, after many false starts and genuine fear her extended family would kill her, she left in September 2019, picked up from the family home by Bec’s colleague. “My parents didn’t think I would do it, they were practically telling me I was a coward, that I didn’t have the guts. Little did they know,” she says in a sing-song tone. Then she laughs.

Khadija bumped around different crisis accommodation, including a convent. Meanwhile, a few weeks after she escaped, Khadija’s family left Australia (they had never applied for permanent residency). “I worry one of them will want to protect the family’s honour and will one day come back. I still fear for my life,” she says.

On this night at the sushi place, Bec comes too. She’s 30-something, has dark hair and is heavily pregnant. She’s like an earth mother, a constant fountain of love and support for Khadija, who she’s remained close to since the escape. Bec tells me she found little support for the girls she helped, even from multicultural youth bodies that had grants to help forced-marriage victims. “Maybe because it’s such a terrible and multifaceted issue, no one knew how to handle it. When these girls came knocking on the door, no one would help.”

The victims of forced marriage are often young – 56 per cent of the AFP’s recent cases were children aged 17 or younger.

Khadija, meanwhile, is studying a bachelor’s degree at university. She has ambitious professional dreams, her Australian residency, a driver’s licence and a part-time healthcare job. Apart from her suburb and the airport, Melbourne had been an unknown expanse to Khadija. She’d never spoken to a man or boy who was outside the family or wasn’t the grocer. “The first time I took a tram, I went the opposite way,” she laughs. “And the first time I saw the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, I was like, ‘Wow! Shit happens!’ ”

Video evidence

It’s hard at first to make sense of the video. Filmed on a phone, it opens on a car clock: 12.56pm. In Arabic, the man filming says this video is evidence, though ultimately he doesn’t need evidence because “it’s my life and I have my authority, whatever I do”. By now, he says, his wife should be awake and preparing food. Still filming, he gets out of the car and goes inside his Perth unit. He captures some dirty pots on the stove. “No food, either,” he complains. Then he films his wife, lying on the bed, asleep.

The man taking this video, on January 17, 2020, is Mohammad Ali Halimi, then 25. Halimi, an Afghani refugee, is working as an Uber driver and Halal-method chicken slaughterer. His sleeping wife is another Afghani refugee, Ruqia Haidari, 21, who had lived for six years in the Victorian regional hub of Shepparton, two hours north of Melbourne. Eight months before this video was taken, Haidari was excited about finishing year 12 and had plans to go to university. She dreamt of being a flight attendant. She told a friend that she didn’t want to get married until she was 27 or 28 and only then to someone she “really loved”. But her mother had other plans.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, after waiting patiently for the front desk officer. ‘I’ve killed my wife.’

Her mother, Sakina Muhammad Jan, pressured Haidari to marry Halimi against her will. When the couple flew to Perth to begin their married lives on November 20, 2019, Haidari found herself isolated and living with a virtual stranger with whom she did not want to be intimate. Halimi, meanwhile, was devastated that his wife was not behaving as he expected, and so he made the “evidence” video as a complaint to Haidari’s family.

The next day, during a fight, Halimi took a 35-centimetre knife to her throat and sliced it twice, killing her in the kitchen. Her brother, Taqi Haidari, told police that Halimi then called him and said: “If you are a man, come and get the dead body of your sister.” With blood on his hands and clothes, Halimi then walked into a police station. “Excuse me,” he said, after waiting patiently for the front desk officer. “I’ve killed my wife.” Halimi pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced in 2021 to life imprisonment with a minimum 19-year parole period.

Ruqia Haidari was murdered by a man she was forced to marry.

Ruqia Haidari’s tragic death put the Australian Federal Police in an interesting position. In August 2019, AFP officers had met with her in Shepparton after her school had notified them that she did not want to get married. They offered to talk to her mother but she refused, saying it would be unhelpful. But after Haidari’s murder, the AFP – which had never had a successful prosecution of a forced-marriage case – raided Muhammad Jan’s home in October 2020 and later charged her with causing a person to enter a forced marriage (their investigation also discovered Muhammad Jan had received a $14,000 dowry from Halimi).

In an upcoming episode of the AFP’s podcast Crime Interrupted, which was provided to Good Weekend, investigators explain that they thought a conviction against Muhammad Jan would set a precedent and deter others. It was also, says Detective Inspector Trevor Russell, “an opportunity for Ruqia’s voice to be heard”. But for many working on the forced-marriage problem, this was a low point. University of Wollongong criminologist Laura Vidal, who did her PhD on forced marriage, says the criminal justice system scapegoated one person within a complex dynamic. “Nothing happened to the matchmaker, or the brothers, or the community or the 500 people who attended the wedding,” says Vidal.

Muhammad Jan was, like her daughter, a forced-marriage victim. At age 12 or 13, she married a fellow Afghani she’d never met. She gave birth to her first child in her early teens. She came to Australia as a refugee with four of her children in 2013 after the Taliban killed her husband. She was uneducated, spoke no English and heavily relied on Shepparton’s Hazara community which, says Vidal, would have expected her, as a mother, to uphold her family’s reputation and find a match for her unmarried daughter.

Last year, in the Victorian County Court, Muhammad Jan was found guilty of causing a person to enter a forced marriage and sentenced to three years’ jail with a one-year minimum. The court had heard how she developed serious depression after her daughter’s murder and often dreamt of her calling out for help. At her sentencing, Muhammad Jan cried and told the judge, via an interpreter, that she’d done nothing wrong. Between 15 and 20 members of the Hazara community attended court that day, many also shouting and getting out of their seats. One collapsed and was taken away in an ambulance. “It was the most dynamic scene I’ve ever seen in 11 years,” the AFP’s Detective Senior Constable Jacob Purcell told the podcast. The AFP had wanted Haidari’s voice heard. But we’ll never know what she would have said that day, watching her mother go to prison.

For Vidal, the prosecution was proof that the criminalisation approach to force marriage had failed. “We’ve got one prosecution in 12 years that was only possible because the victim died. Are we really happy with that?” She has studied various approaches to forced marriage globally and concluded that the best model is not our model – which she calls “the victim-perpetrator binary” – it’s understanding the cultural drivers and gender power dynamics of forced marriage, and working with families to shift behaviours. Danish experts are now setting up a trial of this approach at Life Without Barriers.

Nesreen Bottriell, chief executive officer of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights, says the Muhammad Jan case has further damaged the relationship between Muslim communities and authorities. “The community was shocked by this outcome. It’s going to deter victim-survivors from seeking support for fear of their mother or family members being prosecuted.” Bottriell, whose organisation is one of the services victim-survivors can now use as an alternative to the AFP, says she feels authorities overly target the Muslim community on this issue and fail to consider other religions and communities. She says forced marriage is not religiously sanctioned by Islam. “It’s about power and control over women’s decision-making.”

Ben Moses, the AFP’s acting commander for human exploitation, declined to directly respond to Bottriell’s criticism. He says the AFP’s focus isn’t purely on prosecution, but also prevention through community education and giving victims choice. “As we know, not everyone wants to engage in the criminal justice process and we acknowledge that.”

Constable Taylah Potter, a Melbourne-based forced-marriage investigator, says in the past six months she’s noticed a positive attitude shift, with more young people feeling empowered to discuss the issue with figures of authority. When I ask how she feels about her job, she says it’s easy to get caught up in statistics and court outcomes, but then she’ll help a 16-year-old at risk of forced marriage and “it just completely changes the path of their life”.

The joy of freedom

Miriam serves me chocolate-covered pretzels, mini samosas and chai. She’s wearing black pants, a smart, black short-sleeved top and lipstick. Her neat, one-bedroom rented unit is small, but it’s hers. “I never knew this concept, I don’t know how to explain, just having basics, like having utensils, pots. And then when you move to a house, the bin schedule! Oh, my god, I hate that schedule. And cleaning. Proper cleaning, but with love.” Freedom for Miriam and Khadija is about choice. This rug, not that rug. Take this course, not that one. Go outside.

Freedom. That’s the upside of escaping forced marriage. The downside? It’s that gaping hole left where a family once was. Miriam misses her beloved brother. Stealthily, she tracks him on social media. “I’m trying to see if he would give any indication he wants me back in his life. If that’s the case, I would take him in my arms.”

For Khadija, it’s her sister, still overseas. Khadija is hopeful she’ll not join the estimated 22 million people stuck in forced marriages globally. Recently, Khadija’s been thinking about a moment before she left. Her father had brought two peaches. “I think one of his love languages was definitely fruit,” she laughs. Khadija told him the peach was so sweet. The next day he brought a whole tray and said she could have as many as she liked. “I just can’t forget that. I’m like, ‘How can you be such a good person and such a shitty person at the same time?’ ”

Meanwhile, Miriam is studying healthcare. She’s got her flat, her licence, a job and a car. One day, she may even marry. “I thought men were just heartless, cold, like, not giving any rights to women. Now that I’m outside I’m seeing my friends in their relationships, and it’s different. It’s caring, it’s loving.” I ask about her big dreams for the future. She looks momentarily confused. “This is what I was dreaming about. I’m there, right now.”

* Names have been changed.

1800RESPECT; Life Without Barriers: 1800 403 213

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