Sydney, Australia, July 26 (EFE).- Police in Australia on Friday charged three men with forcing a teenage couple to marry, a crime punishable in the country by up to nine years in prison.
The teenagers wanted to date each other, but their relatives – two related to the boy and one to the girl – organized a religious wedding last year arguing that they had to marry for cultural reasons, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a statement on Friday.
“The legal age for marriage in Australia is 18; and while a child aged 16 to 18 can obtain permission from a Court to marry, the person they wed must be an adult,” AFP Detective Superintendent Peter Chwal said.
The three defendants were charged in a court in Perth in southwest Australia with one count of causing a person to enter into a forced marriage in circumstances of aggravation.
The AFP did not give details of the identities or the religion or cultural origin of the teenage couple – one of whom was aged between 13 and 15 and the other who was 17 – or of the three defendants who live in Perth.
Forced marriage has been illegal in Australia since 2013, even those that have been taken place in religious or cultural ceremonies within the territory of the Oceania country or overseas.
Considered in Australia as a form of modern slavery, force marriage is one that occurs without free and full consent, as well as by coercion, threat, deception or by the inability of the parties involved to understand the nature and effect of this union due to reasons including age or mental capacity.
In the 2019-20 financial year, the Australian Federal Police received reports of 92 forced marriages, of which the victims were under 18 years old in 51 percent of the cases, according to the Girls not Brides website.
In addition, 70 percent of these cases were related to extraterritorial marriages of girls between 15 and 19 years old, the nonprofit said. EFE
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