A number of immigrant families in Finland have forced or tried to force their children into arranged marriages.

   

The foreigners' office of the social affairs centre of the City of Turku has heard of several cases each year in which relatives have tried to compel a girl or a woman to marry a man chosen by the family.

   

In some cases the girl or woman is sent to the country of origin for the wedding.

   

Forced marriages occur in families from a number of different countries, including Iraq, Iran, and India.

In many cases teenagers growing up

in immigrant families in Finland are influenced by both the culture of their country of origin and that of Finland, and the parents are sometimes disturbed by what they see as foreign patterns of behaviour exhibited by their offspring.

   

Some cases of arranged marriage have even involved violence. They usually come to the attention of officials when the victims seek help.

   

Some of Finland's social service officials say that they do not have enough means to protect all immigrants who have been threatened with violence, or those who have actually suffered violence.

   

Police are often unable to do much, unless the situation has escalated to the extent that the victim is in immediate danger.

At the foreigners' office

in Turku, special social worker Kaarina Kankare backs a proposal by the multicultural division of the National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health (STAKES) for women's shelters in secret locations. Nowadays the locations of women's shelters can be found in a telephone book.

   

The office says that the protection of women and girls refusing arranged marriages might even require sending the victim to another country for safety.

The issue of cultural conflicts

within immigrant families made headlines in the Nordic region in 2001 when 26-year-old Fadime Sahindal, the daughter of a Kurdish refugee family living in Sweden, was killed by her father because she refused to marry the man chosen for her by the father.