In Britain, where at least a thousand women are forced into marriage each year, most of the families, like Noor's, have South Asian backgrounds. Some are Hindu, others are Sikh or Muslim. Zafar Ali, who chairs the U.K.'s Slough Race Equality Council, concedes that "there are, and always have been, a number of pressurized marriages," but insists such cases would be condemned by "95% of all Asians and Muslims." In France, coerced brides tend to be of North African origin; in Denmark, most come from the large Turkish community. While one Europe is mesmerized by "reality" matchmaking TV shows, another is quietly enforcing an ancient, nonnegotiable version.

Women are often told that their failure to enter into a match will shame the family. "It's a culturally specific form of domestic violence that is far more common than people realize," says Hannana Siddiqui, director of Southall Black Sisters, a women's resource center outside London. But it's only in the past five years or so that social workers, judges and other professionals have begun to recognize these situations for what they are. Southall Black Sisters handles about 300 cases a year, and the figure is rising. The West Yorkshire Midlands Police, whose jurisdiction includes several cities with large Asian populations, has had an officer, Philip Balmforth, dedicated to the problem since 1995. He deals with about 200 cases a year.

In extreme incidents, women who resist their families pay with their lives. In 1997, the murder of Rukhsana Naz, a 19-year-old Anglo-Pakistani who had fled an arranged marriage, was one of the first cases to focus attention on forced marriage. More recently, in January, Sahda Bibi, 21, was stabbed to death on her wedding day in Birmingham. Bibi was marrying the groom of her choice with her parents' consent, but people close to the case believe that she had reneged on an earlier arranged match. A relative wanted in connection with the murder flew from England to Pakistan hours after the stabbing and has so far eluded capture. Weeks later, another young Anglo-Pakistani woman, Balqis Akhtar, was murdered in her family's home village in Pakistan. Her father is alleged to have confessed to shooting her for refusing to go through with an arranged marriage.

Like other first-generation immigrant children, Noor lived in the narrow gray space between the old country and the new. She grew up in the northern city of Bradford, home to 90,000 ethnic Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians who first arrived in the 1950s to work in the thriving regional textile industry. Noor lived at home with her parents. Her life revolved around school, where she was preparing for exams, her friends and a blossoming relationship with her first boyfriend. She was especially close to her mother. "I could talk to her about anything, tell her anything," says Noor.

Every day, Noor negotiated a culture gap, trading in some customs and holding onto others. Traditional in some respects, Noor's parents also took steps to ensure that she felt at home with British culture, and sent her to a school that was not predominantly Asian. "They wanted me to have English friends," she says. Unlike many Muslim girls in Bradford (and her own mother, who always wore a scarf in public) she does not cover her hair, and the Western clothes she favors are modest yet fashionable. Her accent features the elongated vowels of northern Britain, but she speaks in Urdu with her family.

Last spring, Noor's life began to splinter when her mother died after a brief illness. Her father soon went to Pakistan, leaving Noor in the care of her brothers, one of whom is Ali, who began to run the household in a much more authoritarian way. In September, Ali suddenly announced that a relative from the Netherlands was coming to visit. That's when Noor's nightmare began.

The visitor shocked Noor by mentioning that Noor was to marry her son. When Noor protested to her brother that she was too young to marry, Ali began dropping ominous hints about Asian girls who had been killed by their families for refusing to obey similar dictates. Although Ali had never hurt her, he'd had a few run-ins with the police, Noor says, and she believed he was capable of violence. For two days, her brothers would not allow Noor to leave the house. "Every time I went downstairs and said I'm going to the shop or going to see my friends, they said 'No, we'd rather you stayed inside.'" Terrified, Noor barely left her room. Still, she couldn't believe that the threatened marriage would happen — and certainly not that very week.

The morning after the ambush nikah, Ali woke Noor, handed her a bridal dress and told her they were expected at the wedding hall in two hours. A beautician arrived to do her makeup, but Noor's tears made her job difficult. "She had to keep wiping my face and then applying the makeup again," says Noor. The rest of the day, the celebration of the marriage, was a blur. At one point Munir leaned over from the chair beside her to ask why she was crying. "Because I don't know you, you're a stranger, you're not my husband," she replied. He turned away and continued talking to his friends. After the party, Ali embraced her, saying, "I don't know when I'll see you again." The remark struck her as odd, but Noor's immediate worry was the wedding night ahead.

Noor's clothes had been sent over to Munir's sister's house, and her suitcase was in an upstairs bedroom. Her sister-in-law told her to get changed, so Noor took off her gown, put on her lilac-colored silk pajamas and sat on the bed, rigid with apprehension. "I was so scared, because I knew that no one of my own was there and I was with strangers," she says. When Munir eventually came in, he made a few attempts at physical contact, but Noor pushed him away. He protested that he was her husband and could do what he liked, but soon fell asleep. Noor lay awake most of the night, too afraid to doze for long. The next day brought yet another surprise. "Pack your things," Munir's mother told her. "We're going to Holland tomorrow." Noor followed her new family through the airport in a daze. "I was just so scared, so scared," she says.

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