Any high school student in Berlin knows: there are Muslim girls who do not return to school after the holidays. This type of marriage is prohibited in Germany and their families forcibly marry them in their countries of origin. They often remain there and cannot continue studying. Another growing phenomenon is weddings to facilitate the husband’s legal entry into Germany and, once they return, their identity documents are stolen so that they cannot flee or report. The German authorities have their hands tied because everything happens in the privacy of the family and the brides find out with very little notice, without the ability to react, constantly monitored by their loved ones. But the German police have devised an escape route. The code was already circulating on networks with the hashtag #Löffeltrick (spoon trick) and police sources confirm that it is not false news.
If when passing through the airport security check a spoon is detected in her underwear, the airport police will not show any reaction but will ask the girl for a routine check apart from the family members accompanying her, during which she can report the situation and will receive aid. The Federal Police Inspection confirms that the police have been trained to react when they detect this code and that they will facilitate an exit. Minors may voluntarily be transferred to an anonymous help center and women over 18 years of age may be housed in women’s shelters where they can decide, remotely from the family and with advice, how to proceed.
Figures on the number of minors who are forced into marriage each year are difficult to specify. Since 2011, when the crime of forced marriage came into force with Article 237 of the German Penal Code, these cases have been included in police crime statistics. In 2022, a total of 67 cases and 68 victims were registered. Of these, 31 were completed. The nationalities most affected are Syrian and Turkish. While the proportion of affected people in the Balkan states has doubled. However, advice centers suspect that the real figures are much higher. A project is currently underway at the German Research Center on Integration and Migration (DeZIM) to try to better calibrate it. “On the one hand, we survey a representative group of people and ask if the person themselves are affected by forced marriage,” explains sociologist Mathis Herpell, and we also ask “how many people do you know who are affected by forced marriage?” With these figures, the researchers want to determine the prevalence of forced marriage in the environment of the people surveyed. Pending the results, the Terre des Femmes organization has carried out its own survey in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, with a majority population of Turkish origin, and has detected 496 cases of forced marriage in 2022 alone, of which 88% took place abroad.
“It is very difficult for the authorities to detect these cases in time because the brides are only informed when they are about to travel, they are monitored by their family and they lack reporting channels,” explains Myria Böhmecke, who has carried out 33 workshops in secondary school in the German capital to try to establish early warning systems, “if for example there are girls who are systematically picked up by their family after school, if they are not allowed to participate in excursions or school trips or if they report that they are going to take a long trip abroad in the middle of the course, teachers must give notice so that these cases can be studied before it is too late. Böhmecke believes that the “spoon trick” is a last resort. “Democratic and free societies should have mechanisms that better guarantee the safety and freedom of these girls, trapped in situations and codes of honor that do not belong to our culture and that seriously violate our laws,” he says. “The social pressure on minors is enormous,” he adds, “that is why there is no automatic method or trick, because they themselves often lack real criteria or the ability to report”:
Once marriages have been committed between families, if the bride refuses or resists, the family is obliged to force her or, if necessary, kill her, to repair the stain of honor. In most cases, the bride’s brothers and cousins are responsible for fulfilling the commitment and they themselves will be disowned if they do not achieve it.
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