An interview with child marriage activist Fraidy Reiss - Women’s Media Center

Activist Fraidy Reiss; Photo courtesy of Susan Landmann

Unchained at Last was started by Fraidy Reiss, who herself is a forced-marriage survivor. In her widely shared TEDx Talk, where she talks about this awful practice, she candidly talks about her own forced marriage at 19 in a tight-knit religious community and having to eventually escape a violent and abusive situation with her daughters in tow. The work she is doing today is nothing short of heroic.

If you are 18 or older and you call us at Unchained, the first thing we help you do is to leave home and get to a domestic violence shelter. If you're not yet 18, in most of the United States, you’re considered a runaway. Also, if we help you to leave home before you’re 18, we could be charged. That actually happened in one of the cases that we worked on. One of our volunteers was charged criminally for helping a 14-year-old girl escape.

There are many reasons. Tradition, whether that’s cultural or religious, is a big one, especially with the forced marriage of adults. That was certainly the case in my family. Often the legal needs [forced marriage victims] have are [related to] immigration. Sometimes a person is brought from overseas for forced marriage and doesn’t have legal immigration status. Also, it could be a legal name change. Some women have to change their name legally from a family that refuses to allow them to leave and will continue to search for them and retaliate against them for daring to say no.

I feel very fortunate and privileged to help her through her really difficult journey, to help her get divorced, to get custody of her children, to help her care for her kids while she was so sick. I was able to babysit them while she had surgery. When she had to go for her treatments, she didn’t have a car, and we were able to get one for her. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago, she died. But she was the first person who came to us and trusted us to support her through that.

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