ending child marriage
Jen Kiaba doesn’t need to say a word to describe the trauma of her forced marriage to a stranger and her courageous escape from it. She explains it perfectly, in gut-wrenching detail, through photography.
Now, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Jen, we at Unchained will share her powerful photos over the next year — to illustrate the horror of forced marriage in the U.S.
Jen grew up in the infamous Unification Church cult, where she was forced at age 20 to marry a man the cult leader chose for her at random during a mass “matching ceremony.” When she finally managed to escape from the marriage and the cult, she said, it was with a “proverbial scarlet A branded into my chest.”
Jen went on to earn a degree in art history from Bard College. Today she is an artist and educator whose work has won a third-place Julia Margaret Cameron Award and an Honorable Mention in the 13th Pollux Award and was a top-200 finalist in Critical Mass.
She has no regrets about her imaginary scarlet A. “It is my battle scar from a fight I am proud to have survived,” Jen said, “because I fought my way into this new world.”
