In this episode, Dr. Helen McCabe is joined by Lauren Eglen to discuss learning about the relationship between forced marriage and modern slavery from survivor narratives. Considering accounts of the lived experience of people who have been forced into marriages shows that women (all the narratives analyzed, bar one, are from women) are subjected to a range of other forms of modern slavery, such as forced labor, forced sexual exploitation, and trafficking. As Helen and Lauren discuss, doing domestic labour, working to support the household in agriculture of the informal economy, and providing sexual and reproductive services are a significant part of what it means for many to be “a wife”, and in forced marriages, where this is non-consensual, and often enforced by violence, this may not only be a form of modern slavery broadly conceived but de facto slavery, as defined by the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery.

Content Warning: this episode contains some graphic accounts taken from survivors’ narratives of violence experienced within forced marriages.