Judging by the harrowing testimonies in Kate Ryan Brewer’s documentary, the US legal system offers little protection for teenage
Women pushed to marry against their will
There’s no rosy nostalgia to the wedding photos featured in Knots: A Forced Marriage Story, a 75-minute documentary written and directed by Kate Ryan Brewer that calls attention to the disturbingly few barriers against coerced marriage in the US. In succinct and gnawing first-person interviews, three women detail how intense parental pressure, teenage gullibility and isolation forced them into marriage with people they barely knew. There’s Nina van Harn, raised in the fundamentalist Christian patriarchy movement in rural western Michigan and married at 19 to a man selected by her father; Sara Tasneem, married at 15 to a 28-year-old stranger by her father; and Fraidy Reiss, paired by an Orthodox Jewish matchmaker in Brooklyn at 19.
Along with the three women’s personal testimonies of coercion, confusion, shattered
BREAKING points and eventual escape (all through arduous divorce proceedings), Knots weaves in bits of legal and historical context for a deeply troubling portrait of archaic marriage laws in the US. As the film points out, 48 states allow marriage for those under 18 through various exceptions, while 13 states have no age minimums for marriage at all.