Jen Kiaba doesn’t need to say a word to describe the trauma of her forced marriage to a stranger and her courageous escape from it. She explains it perfectly, in gut-wrenching detail, through photography.
Now, as part of an ongoing, yearlong collaboration with Jen, we at Unchained are sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram the powerful photos from her Burdens of White Dress portfolio to illustrate the horror of forced marriage in the U.S.
Jen grew up in the infamous Unification Church cult, where she was forced at age 20 to marry a man the cult leader chose for her at random during a mass “matching ceremony.” When she finally managed to escape from the marriage and the cult, she said, it was with a “proverbial scarlet A branded into my chest.”
Jen went on to earn a degree in art history from Bard College. Today she is an artist and educator whose work has won a third-place Julia Margaret Cameron Award and an Honorable Mention in the 13th Pollux Award and was a top-200 finalist in Critical Mass.
She has no regrets about her imaginary scarlet A. “It is my battle scar from a fight I am proud to have survived,” Jen said, “because I fought my way into this new world.”
