Forced To Marry

This is based on the author's true story of her forced marriage. It's an important story that has to be told, because forced marriage and child marriage has happened and continues to happen to hundreds of thousands of girls all over the world.

MARRY THE KING, SAVE THE WORLD When the fae came, their magic brought destruction that only stopped when we offered them the one thing they wanted: Wives for their kings. I was selected "at random". Sacrificed to the fae. But the sexy, infuriating king I'm paired with doesn't want my body or soul; he wants my help. Thanks to some kind of prophecy, he and his people think I can get them back home. Getting them back home will require taking some of the king's magic, which is unstable on the best of days and catastrophic on the worst. When the power takes more effort to control than I would've ever guessed, and I'm forced to turn to my husband for help. But the fae never give anything away for free; especially knowledge. It was supposed to be simple: Marry the king, save the world. But now that we're married, and his power is becoming mine, our marriage might end up destroying the world... and I might be the one who destroys it. If you love books by Jennifer L Armentrout, Holly Black, Elise Kova, or Jaymin Eve, you'll devour this slow-burn enemies-to-lovers fae romance featuring an exciting new take on mermaids, faeries, dragons, and more!

With her aging grandfather on his deathbed and not expected by his doctors to live for more than two or three months, it comes as little comfort to the beautiful Gytha Sullivan that he has made her the heiress to his considerable fortune. What is much worse is Sir Robert Sullivan’s fear that she will be seduced by some ‘smarmy fortune-hunter’, who will squander her inheritance. And this deep concern of his makes him insist that she marries one or other of her two loathsome cousins, Vincent and Jonathan, who will do anything to take his fortune for themselves. Desperate to escape from this terrible fate, Gytha goes to visit the Master of the neighbouring estate, the dashingly handsome Lord Locke, whose life her father once saved in the War against Napoleon, and beseeches him to, in turn, save her by becoming engaged to her, thereby making a forced marriage to either of her cousins impossible. Appalled by the poor girl’s plight his Lordship agrees much to the anger of Gytha’s family and his exotic lover the entrancing Princess Zuleika. Little does Lord Locke know that, as he gains a false fiancée, he is truly about to lose his heart!

This testimony exposes the realities of forced marriage. Leila tells of how she was brought up in France by Moroccan-born parents and then forcibly married to a man 15 years her senior whose language she couldn't understand. She tells how she escaped the violence of this marriage to fight back against family tradition.

Forced Marriage: Introducing a social justice and human rights perspective brings together leading practitioners and researchers from the disciplines of criminology, sociology and law. Together the contributors provide an international, multi-disciplinary perspective that offers a compelling alternative to prevailing conceptualisations of the problem of forced marriage. The volume examines advances in theoretical debates, analyses existing research and presents new evidence that challenges the cultural essentialism that often characterises efforts to explain, and even justify, this violation of women's rights. By locating forced marriage within broader debates on violence against women, social justice and human rights, the authors offer an intersectional perspective that can be used to inform both theory and practical efforts to address violence against diverse groups of women. This unique book, which is informed by practitioner insights and academic research, is essential reading for practitioners and students of sociology, criminology, gender studies and law.

With forced marriage, as with so many human rights issues, the sensationalized hides the mundane, and oversimplified popular discourses miss the range of experiences. In sub-Saharan Africa, the relationship between coercion and consent in marriage is a complex one that has changed over time and place, rendering impossible any single interpretation or explanation. The legal experts, anthropologists, historians, and development workers contributing to Marriage by Force? focus on the role that marriage plays in the mobilization of labor, the accumulation of wealth, and domination versus dependency. They also address the crucial slippage between marriages and other forms of gendered violence, bondage, slavery, and servile status. Only by examining variations in practices from a multitude of perspectives can we properly contextualize the problem and its consequences. And while early and forced marriages have been on the human rights agenda for decades, there is today an unprecedented level of international attention to the issue, thus making the coherent, multifaceted approach of Marriage by Force? even more necessary.