Forced to marry in Bangladesh, a woman finds a haven in Brooklyn

Carrie Ellman-Larsen, who teaches theatre in public schools, isn’t usually out late, but on a mild night in August, she decided to go for a walk in her neighbourhood, south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Within minutes, she came upon a fight. A man was blocking the path of a young woman — “holding her tight,” she recalled — while the woman struggled against him. Though Ellman-Larsen couldn’t understand the language, she was alarmed. “Something,” she said, “was very wrong.”

“Is everything OK?” she asked. The man responded, implying that the woman — his wife — was mentally ill. But Ellman-Larsen was not convinced. Men surrounded the couple. “Let her come with us,” they told Ellman-Larsen. “This is a Bengali thing. We will help her.”

But Ellman-Larsen was dubious. She wanted the woman in the centre of the dispute to speak for herself. Finally, the woman uttered, “Forced marriage” in English. “I am not safe. Please, help me.”

Another neighbour called 911. When police officers arrived, they told the woman, who was reluctant to engage with them and declined to press any charges, to go home, according to Ellman-Larsen.

“I have a feeling something else is happening,” Ellman-Larsen told the officers. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but I don’t think it is just what she is saying.”

Zahan, one of the first residents of Asiyah Women’s Shelter, a temporary shelter dedicated to Muslim immigrants fleeing domestic violence, in New York, March 24, 2019. For Muslim immigrants desperate to flee their abusers, there are almost no safe options. A community in Brooklyn organized to change that. (Kholood Eid/The New York Times)

— A Forced Marriage Unravels

It wasn’t until later that night that the woman in the middle of the dispute, a 20-year-old immigrant who asked to go by Zahan, her maiden name, for safety reasons, felt comfortable enough to share her story.

With anti-Muslim sentiment on the rise over the past few years, Zahan had become part of an almost invisible population of immigrant women who feel like they have no recourse in leaving abusive relationships. Between fears of deportation and endangering their families, many choose to stay hidden, living with the risks.

Zahan was one of the lucky ones.

She had been in New York for just three months before the incident in Brooklyn. Zahan had moved to the city from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where she had lived with her family and studied computer engineering.

One afternoon in 2017, Zahan’s parents informed her that guests were coming, and asked her to dress formally. An older couple soon arrived with their son, a 30-year-old US citizen of Bangladeshi origin. Zahan and the stranger were to be married.

“I was so surprised, like, what?” she said. “I started crying.”

Forced marriage is widespread in Bangladesh, where according to UNICEF, 59% of girls are married by 18. But unlike her mother, who married when she was 16, Zahan dreamed of graduating from college and becoming independent. She had received proposals before, and turned them all down.

Zahan’s new husband returned to the United States to apply for a spouse visa. In Bangladesh, Zahan continued trying to convince her family to let her give up the marriage. When her parents discovered that she had consulted with a divorce lawyer, they called her a prostitute, withdrew her from school, locked her in the house, and turned “violent,” she said. (In separate phone calls to Bangladesh, Zahan’s mother and older brother confirmed these events.)

“She was so depressed,” said the brother, who took her side against the family. “There was nothing she could do.”

Zahan became resigned to her fate. After about a year, her husband returned to Bangladesh to fetch her. A party was held in their honour, and this time she smiled for the camera. They left together for the United States.

— ‘He Became So Dominating’

The couple landed at Kennedy International Airport in May.

On their first night together in New York, Zahan expressed to her husband that they should “get to know each other,” she recalled. If he took her to watch Bollywood movies, or if they walked holding hands around the city, maybe she’d be able “to feel it,” she told him. But he disagreed.

Her Bangladeshi husband could have seen it as his conjugal right. But for Zahan, it was something else altogether.

“I was crying, but he didn’t care,” she said. She showed the self-harm marks still visible on her wrists from earlier that summer.

Zahan had been told that she would be deported if she tried to leave her husband, she said, adding that her passport had been taken from her upon arrival in New York. Promises to enrol her in school or let her work were not kept. “I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have the keys to the house,” she continued. “He became so dominating.”

In a recent phone call to Zahan’s husband, he denied any act of violence or abuse, and challenged that the marriage was forced. Asked about how he met his wife, he said it was through family, but did not respond to the question about the circumstances of the marriage.

On that fateful Sunday night in Brooklyn last summer, Zahan’s husband had taken her to an annual Bangladeshi fair. As in past public appearances that summer, he told her to smile and pretend to be in love. She did. But as they walked home that night, Zahan decided she couldn’t take it anymore. So she started to run — to where, she had no idea, but her husband soon caught up to her.

This was the scene discovered by Ellman-Larsen, who stayed behind to help Zahan collect herself after the neighbours had dispersed (her husband, too, had disappeared at some point during the chaos). “She didn’t have any support, she didn’t know anybody. We were trying to find a friend, but she knew no one; she had nothing,” Ellman-Larsen said. “The police called Bangladesh, but all her father said was that she should go home with her husband, because it was her job to stay with him.”

Ellman-Larsen then used her phone to post a message on Facebook: “I need a female Bengali advocate now.”

The message reached Shahana Hanif, a Bangladeshi-American Muslim feminist and director of organising for Democratic Councilman Brad Lander. Hanif, who contacted the women immediately, struggled for hours to find Zahan a place to stay before remembering a local mosque that had just opened a safe house for Muslim immigrant women. They checked Zahan in at about 2 a.m. Three days later, she filed a police report.

— ‘This Is Really an Epidemic’

The location for the Asiyah Women’s Shelter is kept secret, for safety reasons. At the entrance, a sign in English reads, “Don’t forget your roots.” Inside, news is usually broadcast in Arabic, and sometimes a Bengali musical will play on a 40-inch screen. Scents of Middle Eastern food and South Asian curries waft through the open kitchen and living room.

In an era of travel bans, anti-immigration sentiment and terrorist attacks on mosques, anxieties among many Muslims are high. If they happen to be Muslim survivors of abuse, the fear can be paralysing. A refuge in the city that welcomes them with open arms can provide hope and a sense of safety. Asiyah opened the day before Zahan left her husband.

One of the women in charge of the kitchen is Fadia Darwish, a 52-year-old immigrant from Syria and the aunt of Dania Darwish, Asiyah’s director. She had been visiting her daughter in the United States when the war broke out in her home country, preventing her return. She volunteers on night shifts, while she waits to be reunited with the rest of her family in Germany.

The shelter is under the umbrella of Muslims Giving Back, a charity in Sunset Park based out of the Muslim Community Center mosque — the same mosque Hanif had contacted in the middle of the night when Zahan had made her move.

Mohamed Bahi, an American-Algerian who founded the nonprofit and directs the mosque, said the idea for the shelter came after domestic-violence survivors started approaching him for help in increasing numbers.

“In the past two years, immigrant women started coming more and more, because they are afraid of using public services,” he said. “They fear that Trump’s administration is creating a system where the shelters and law enforcement are connecting. It came to a point when we had families living in our mosque sometimes for weeks. I was like, ‘Wow. This is really an epidemic.’”

There is also fear among immigrants — either those in the country illegally or, like Zahan, those afraid of losing their immigration status — of appearing in court. “Survivors are less likely to report crimes and go to the courts because they are afraid they may run into ICE,” said Evangeline Chan, director of the Immigration Law Project at Safe Horizon and a member of a coalition that has been trying to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement out of the courthouses. “It is frustrating and heartbreaking.”

This is not an irrational fear. Between 2016 and 2018, ICE operations in and around New York state courthouses increased 1,700%, according to a survey by the Immigrant Defense Project. Most arrests took place in New York City, with Queens and Brooklyn reporting the largest numbers.

— ‘The Fear Is Real’

At Asiyah, Dania Darwish, its director, held up her phone. There were incoming calls at 2, 3 and 5:30 in the morning, all immigrant women in danger looking for a safe place to sleep. Darwish said that she was unable to take them all.

Though New York City has a population of nearly 800,000 Muslims, Asiyah is the only safe house dedicated to Muslim women fleeing domestic violence. The City’s Domestic Violence shelter system is overseen by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, and cannot discriminate based on religion, according to Grace Bonilla, from the Human Resources Administration. With its religious affiliation, Asiyah is not eligible for public money and has struggled to operate solely on donations.

As of mid-March, 73 women had stayed at Asiyah — all immigrants from Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, Syria or Yemen, from all five boroughs of New York City. There have been several mothers, including a Pakistani who had just given birth prematurely, she said, after her husband tried to poison her, as well as a Bangladeshi with three children in tow. She had visible black and blue marks, and was still bleeding from a miscarriage.

Darwish said that all the women at Asiyah are afraid of being deported if they turn in their spouses. “Many women who come to us are sponsored by their husbands, and they are scared to report,” she said. “Abusers threaten them that if they call the cops they’ll be taken to jail.”

Kavita Mehra, executive director of Sakhi for South Asian Women, a New York organisation committed to ending gender-based violence, said she saw a drop in the number of women contacting her nonprofit from 400 in 2017 to 350 in 2018. “Even in the most progressive city in the country,” Mehra said, “the fear is real.”

Zahan was among the 350 women referred to Sakhi in 2018 and has, so far, managed to take successful steps in starting a new life for herself in New York. She was connected with a pro bono immigration lawyer, and in late September, Sakhi helped her move into a shelter run by the nonprofit Womankind.

The maximum stay in a shelter is 180 days, or six months. So, last week, Zahan moved to a new apartment. She was also able to find a job as a cashier at a fast-food chain, and is “no longer scared of using public transportation,” she said, with a rare laugh. Recently, she was accepted into a nursing program at a community college — but for now she is focused on making enough money to pay the rent.

© 2019 New York Times News Service