The New York Times today features a column about Unchained At Last with the headline, “Woman Breaks Through Chains of Forced Marriage, and Helps Others Do the Same.”
The piece focuses on Unchained’s executive director, Fraidy Reiss, who, after escaping her own abusive arranged marriage, founded Unchained to help women and girls from all cultures and religions to flee or resist forced marriages.
Unchained provides free legal services to its clients. And “because the clients’ situations can be so catastrophic — forced at gunpoint to accept a marriage, raped by a husband, essentially imprisoned within the home as a domestic servant — Unchained at Last also provides mentoring, access to therapy and cash stipends for everything from basic clothing to English as a second language class,” the column explains.
The column quotes an Unchained client as saying: “I cannot even describe what it’s like to have an angel sweep down and kiss you on the forehead and then hold your hand and tell you, ‘I’m not letting go until you’re O.K.’ ”
The piece describes how Unchained has grown in less than four years to help more than 90 women and girls, pass a law in New Jersey last year, and participate earlier this week in a planning session held by the White House Council on Women and Girls to develop a national policy on forced marriage.
You can join the effort to help end forced marriage in the U.S.
Register now to join a historic Chain-In on April 14 in Union Square (New York City). Survivors, activists and others will stand in chains, with duct tape across their mouths, to show the world what life looks like for the many thousands of girls and women in forced marriages in the U.S.
For other ways to help end forced marriage, visit unchainedatlast.org.
