Anisa Yousaf, survivor of a forced marriage: 'Parents should give their daughters freedom of choice'

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https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-02-15/anisa-yousaf-survivor-of-a-forced-marriage-parents-should-give-their-daughters-freedom-of-choice.html

Anisa Yousaf, survivor of a forced marriage: ‘Parents should give their daughters freedom of choice’

A Pakistani court ruling declared the arrangement orchestrated by her father from Barcelona and against her will illegal

JESÚS GARCÍA BUENO
Barcelona - FEB 14, 2025 - 23:50 EST

Anisa Yousaf is now free to marry the man she loves. A family court in Lahore in Pakistan has annulled the forced marriage her father tried to impose on her. During the summer vacations of 2021, Anisa traveled home from Spain to attend her sister’s wedding. But her father had set a trap for her: he informed her that she had to marry a nephew of his, who would then be eligible for a visa to travel to Spain.

Anisa refused to become an economic instrument and to give up her dreams of love. Her father then subjected her to psychological and physical abuse that almost cost her her life. She managed to escape and asked for help from Acesop, a Barcelona-based organization that helps women who are victims of a practice that is still common in rural communities in India and Pakistan. So-called “honor crimes” claim the lives of 500 women every year.

Anisa, now 24, arrives at the organization’s headquarters in the heart of the Raval district, accompanied by her current partner and their two-month-old baby, to tell her story: “Parents should give their daughters freedom of choice. Women should be able to marry the man of their choice. If marriage is imposed, neither the wife nor the husband can be happy and problems arise. I was very unhappy, but now I am very happy that I chose the partner of my own free will, thank God,” she says in Urdu.

The three of them arrived by bus from a small village where they live hidden in a foster home. Anisa is happy after learning of a pioneering sentence that has freed her, definitively, from the yoke of a link she never accepted. But she still feels insecure: “I can’t come to Barcelona because my father lives here. And I’m afraid to go back to Pakistan,” says the young woman, who has applied for political asylum in Spain.

When Anisa escaped from Pakistan, she reported the case in Spain and applied for asylum. The police launched an investigation and, after a while, her father, who also lived in Catalonia, was arrested for the crime of trafficking in human beings for the purpose of forced marriage. She has not spoken to him since. Nor with the rest of her family members, a wound that doesn’t heal. “My family is my husband, my son and me,” she says, looking at her partner, bottle-feeding their baby, who is squinting, about to fall asleep. The couple has known each other since childhood. Their marriage, in fact, was initially arranged by their families. Eventually, they fell in love. “But my father changed his mind. He used me so someone could get papers. It’s something that is normalized here.”

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