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.
Mostly among nobility, given that it was quite similar in different places (e.g. Rome (cum manu) vs. the Germanic tribes (Muntehe)) it’s probably something that got imported by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. It never was the sole form of marriage, and much less common to unheard of among people with less political power to inherit.
That form getting outlawed was past enlightenment (16th and 17th century), at least in Germany the right of a woman to annul a forced marriage was considered as established in the 18th century… before that it was probably hit and miss, depending on suzerain, etc. Love marriage becoming the ideal was only in the 19th. That’s not to say that people didn’t marry for love earlier, but that was the point where economical considerations were put second place at best. Also couples of course have eloped since time immemorial. Also nobles. Say, Mary Tudor.
And then we have to factor inheritance practices into it – again, in Germany (a, by and large, stem family culture) single heirs were the norm (until that was outlawed you can give a single kid at most 50% of everything nowadays), with the property transfer generally being done while the parents were still alive: Transfer of the estate to a freshly married couple (one of them your kid) in exchange for support in old age, archives are full of transfer contracts like that. If you wanted to marry someone your parents couldn’t stand it was very possible to hear “then your younger sibling is going to inherit”. The non-inheriting kids would set off elsewhere, get a stipend to learn a trade, become clergy, or be employed by the inheriting sibling.