Criminalisation of forced marriages in Poland: the critical analyses of the reasons behind this current legal change

In 2023, Polish law saw the establishment of a new crime: forcing a person to marry someone. These provisions were combined with and supplemented by the criminalisation of luring a person to leave Poland with the intention of forcing them into marriage. This legislation was rather unexpected, considering that at the time, the government and the parliamentary majority were composed of alt-right political parties that were actively opposing both women's rights and the influx of immigrants, especially from what politicians referred to as “culturally distant countries”.

In this paper, I present the newly adopted legislation and analyse its reasons against the backdrop of two case studies: the Polish Roma community and the Chechen community in Poland. The latter is based on fieldwork involving interviews with refugee women who experienced various forms of domestic violence while in Poland, as well as experts working with this group. These forms of gender-based violence included forced marriages, mostly in the form of early marriages. The paper aims to assess whether this new regulation has the potential to improve the protection of potential victims, especially women with migration backgrounds in Poland and, more broadly, whether criminal law is the appropriate response to social problems and the best tool to protect potential victims when abusers are family members.