When she came home hours later, he was gone. I don’t have to take this,” and leaving for the whole day with her girls. When her husband flew into rages, Reiss says she would lock herself and her two young daughters in the girls’ bedroom, sitting on the floor, huddled together as he threatened them with violence from the other side of the door.ĭuring one of these abusive incidents in December 2006, Reiss recalls thinking, “I am going to get out of here. When she was accepted to Rutgers University, about an hour away from where she was living, her husband tried to stop her from going. “I kept money in a box of Whole Grain Total cereal in the back of the pantry – somewhere I knew he would never look,” says Reiss. Girls were not supposed to go to college in her insular community, but she secretly applied and began saving up enough money to leave her husband. There was intense pressure to get married – and to stay married – and as time went on, life for Reiss and her children grew more dangerous. While state laws do not support this, many young women may be too frightened to go through the courts to assert their legal rights for fear of retaliation from their own communities. In her religious community, women had no right to seek a divorce – only a man could grant a divorce. It is a horrific form of human rights abuse.īy Fraidy Reiss ‘I hid money in a box of cereal’Īfter her husband became violent, Reiss saw first-hand just how trapped young women can be.
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Many girls are forced into a marriage before they have the full rights of adulthood. “I had seen how unmarried women were treated and was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t get married.” I didn’t really have a right to say no,” she says. Single women were mocked and treated terribly. Reiss says that in her community, young women, even though they may be over the age of 18, do not have agency to decide when they want to get married.Īs girls get closer to finishing high school – usually the only education they can expect to receive – the process of arranging their marriages begins around 11th or 12th grade. After they were married, they moved to an ultra-orthodox community in New Jersey where they both had family members living. Reiss had been introduced to him through a matchmaker. When she was just 19, she entered into an arranged marriage with a 22-year-old man who was a stranger to her. I couldn’t have my own money, have a driver’s licence, go to school – I was trapped for 15 years.”įraidy Reiss, a 45-year-old mother of two daughters who lives in New Jersey, grew up in an insular, ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York. He flew into rages and controlled every aspect of my life.
“A week after we got married, my husband became violent.