Arranged servitude: How forced marriages violently confine women

This article examines the prevalence and dynamics of forced and arranged marriages in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, tracing how women's autonomy is constrained and how consent is negotiated under pressure within patriarchal social structures. The study asks how consent is negotiated, justified, and experienced in situations where refusal would carry social, economic, or familial consequences. Employing a thematic analysis of 55 in-depth interviews, the study explores how these practices are sustained through intersecting pressures, honour, kinship obligations, economic precarity, and familial control. This is the first multi-site, gender-focused study to examine forced and arranged marriages across Kurdish and Arab communities. The research examines the continuum between “arranged” and “forced” marriage and the social logics that position women within these systems. Situated within feminist and sociological analyses of gendered constraint, the findings demonstrate how marriage functions as a social and economic strategy, how families mobilise marriage to safeguard honour or consolidate status, and why legal prohibitions remain largely disconnected from lived realities. The article contributes new empirical insight into how coercion is rationalised within kinship systems and how women navigate constrained forms of agency in contexts where alternatives are limited. While forced marriage is legally prohibited in the region, the study argues that legal reforms alone are insufficient without corresponding shifts in social norms, institutional practices, and community-level interventions that address the structural conditions enabling these marriages.