Also taken from the United States to be sold into marriage was Lina Alahri. At nineteen, she was told that her grandmother in Yemen was ailing, and so she went to that war-torn nation with her father. There she was told that she was to marry a stranger. She refused. But there really was no escape.

She was taken to the groom’s home where his family waited for evidence that the marriage had been consummated. It was only the promise of her return home that led her to agree to the marriage. Offering to obtain visas for the family upon her return to the States, she was allowed to fly to New York where representatives of Tahirih met her flight. But it took months of planning to arrange her escape from Yemen back to America.

With the war in Yemen pounding outside her windows, she worked with Tahirih and her best friend from home to orchestrate the plan. After marrying the stranger, she returned to the U.S. on a pledge to acquire visas for her in-laws. When she landed in the United States, Tahirih was waiting.

The forced marriages of American women are not only happening when they venture overseas, they are happening here at home as well. In a 2011 survey that only covered two years, Tahirih found 3,000 cases of forced marriage within our immigrant communities.

Last month there was a report of a sixteen-year-old San Antonio girl, originally from Iraq, who was beaten by her parents for six months because she refused a forced/arranged marriage. Using broomsticks or mop handles to beat her resulted in a cut on her arm that required hospitalization. Her father choked her until she almost lost consciousness and her mother threw hot cooking oil on her, leaving scars on her hands and legs.

Her intended husband deposited $20,000 into her parents bank account on the day she turned 16 as part of the marriage arrangement. He also offered the girl gold jewelry and gold bars if she would consent. She finally ran away and found shelter with an unnamed organization. Her parents have since been arrested under family violence laws in Texas.

But forced or arranged marriages are not restricted to our immigrant communities. They often involve American women of deep faith in the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian religions.

There is a difference between an arranged marriage and a forced marriage. Arranged marriages are nothing new—matchmakers have probably existed for as long as men and women have been marrying. Today’s version can be found online as well as in the real world. Arranged marriages have also been an integral part of many religious faiths for generations. But there is a very fine line between arranged and forced marriages, and some question if an arranged marriage can be anything but forced. Fraidy Reiss is one of those women.

Today, Fraidy Reiss runs Unchained at Last, the non-profit she founded to help women escape from arranged/forced marriages. Born and raised in Brooklyn to a very observant ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, at nineteen and single, Fraidy found herself bound to a stranger in marriage. It was a marriage for which she had been groomed all of her life—to be the wife of an observant Jewish man and the mother of his children.

A week into the marriage, Reiss’s husband woke up late and, in a blind rage, punched a hole in the bedroom wall. It was the beginning of nearly 15 years of living with a man whose constant physical threats against her — though he never actually beat her — came to dominate Reiss’s daily life.

Under pressure from her family and insular religious community to remain in the marriage she questioned the freedom that she was allowed to reject the arranged marriage.

Reiss argues that “choice” is a relative term. Technically, she pointed out, she could have refused to marry. There is having a choice, and then there’s “choice,” she said. That is even truer after the marriage takes place.

She was finally able to leave him in 2011, but in doing so she was forced to leave everyone she had ever known, including all family members save one sister with whom she maintains occasional contact. This was a woman who was forced to agree in writing to never get a driver’s license or take the SAT tests before her marriage. She graduated from Rutgers University at age 32, in spite of the resistance of her family and community. When she divorced her abusive husband her family disowned her.

Being familiar with the high cost of escaping a forced marriage, she has worked to make it easier for other women who were likewise trapped.

Unchained At Last is the only organization in the US dedicated to helping women and girls leave or avoid arranged/forced marriages and rebuild their lives. Unchained provides women and girls with free legal and social services and emotional support.

Unchained at Last has also worked to change the laws governing marriage in the United States to ensure that marriages are not forced, but entered into willingly by both parties. And they are fighting to stop the marriage of child brides:

Child marriage, or marriage before 18, is legal in every US state. And child marriage is happening in the US at an alarming rate: Unchained’s groundbreaking research revealed that nearly a quarter-million children as young as 12 were married in the US between 2000 and 2010 – mostly girls wed to adult men.

They have had some recent successes in states such as Florida and Kentucky which I wrote about here. Many, if not most, victims of forced marriages are children. And that is what makes it even harder for them to escape. Many shelters will not accept a woman under eighteen, nor can she, in most jurisdictions, even sign a lease on an apartment or get a hotel room. It is essential that if a state is going to allow children to wed, they should emancipate them first.