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.

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.worldEnglish
    292·
    5 months ago

    An Afghan Hazara refugee who fled persecution from the Taliban and migrated to regional Victoria with her five children in 2013, Jan’s lawyers have said she suffers enduring “grief” over the death of her daughter but continues to maintain her innocence.

    Escaped a fundamentalist, authoritarian regime only then to implement her own personal authoritarian, fundamentalist beliefs.

    Not to excuse the mother, but I wonder if trauma played a role. She was traumatised by a toxic situation and perhaps to gain a sense of control, she repeated it to others. There is a book called “The Body Keeps a Score”. The author is a psychologist, inspired from when he was a child when his father, a Holocaust survivor, told him to not question him and just obey. To which the author replied that he sounded like the Nazis who imprisoned him. Again, I’m not trying to excuse, but I’m curious if the Afghan mother has had something similar experience and acting on trauma.