Kiran (name changed) lived with her in-laws in a village in northern India. Her husband lived more than 10,000km away in Brisbane, Australia. Yet distance did not mean freedom.
As reported by The Guardian, soon after the birth of their first child, cameras were installed inside the house in the kitchen, living room and outdoor areas. The screens streamed directly into her husband’s home in Australia.
“He would say, ‘I can always see what you do’,” Kiran recalls through an interpreter in an interaction with The Guardian.
The cameras were installed in 2017, when her husband visited India. By then, the couple had been married for two years, following a Sikh ceremony in Punjab near the India–Pakistan border. Over the next eight years, he would visit her only four times, staying for about a month each time.
A marriage built on promises of migration
Kiran was just 22 when she got married. Like many women in arranged marriages, she knew little about her husband before the wedding. What mattered to her family was that he had permanent residency in Australia, worked a white-collar job and did not drink alcohol. These details made him an “ideal match”.
But within a month of the wedding, he returned to Australia. Kiran remained behind with his parents, carrying out household duties while waiting for the life she had been promised, one abroad with her husband.
Control, violence and long-distance abuse
During the few times her husband returned to India, arguments often turned violent. When he was away, control continued through daily phone calls and surveillance. Over calls from Brisbane, he instructed her to follow his mother’s orders, cooking, cleaning and caring for his parents.
“He would say I can see you on the camera, make sure what you cook is fresh for my parents,” she told The Guardian. Slowly, Kiran began to understand her position in the household. “I came to realise this life was not for me. He had no interest in me. I had just been bought here to take care of others,” she told The Guardian.
The rise of ‘abandoned brides’
Women’s rights groups say Kiran’s story reflects a wider pattern of “abandoned brides,” women deserted after marriage by husbands living abroad in countries including Australia, Canada and the UK.
Some cases involve financial exploitation, with men taking dowry money before disappearing. Others involve women being used as unpaid domestic labour for in-laws, a situation that some activists compare to modern slavery.
In other instances, men claim they are unable to bring their wives overseas due to visa problems, leaving women trapped in limbo. Punjab, where Kiran lived, has been described by advocates as an epicentre of such cases.
A visa trap
By early 2022, Kiran’s mental health had deteriorated. Community elders urged her husband to reunite the family. The following year, he travelled to India and brought Kiran and their children to Australia.
“At that time, I thought God has finally listened to my prayers and I will get to live with my husband, my children will have a father,” Kiran told The Guardian.
But when she arrived in Brisbane, she discovered she had been brought on a tourist visa. not a partner visa that could lead to permanent residency. Soon after, her husband initiated divorce proceedings. Regardless her children being Australian citizens, Kiran had no legal right to stay in the country long-term.
Visa abuse as coercive control
Yasmin Khan, who supported Kiran through the separation, says the surveillance and visa dependency were forms of coercive control.
Khan heads the Bangle Foundation, a Queensland-based service that supports south Asian women facing domestic abuse. The organisation receives around 1,000 calls each year related to domestic abuse, visa exploitation and trafficking. About 60% of these calls come from women based interstate or overseas. The foundation operates on grants, donations and limited state government support, with no ongoing funding.
Barriers to seeking help
Khan says many migrant and culturally and linguistically diverse women hesitate to approach mainstream support services. Fear of having to explain arranged marriages, family expectations and cultural norms often keeps women silent.
“They’re not going elsewhere because of issues of culture, tradition, shame, honour and embarrassment,” she told The Guardian. Today, Kiran remains in visa limbo. She is fighting to stay in Australia so she can raise her two children in safety.
Another woman, another country
Kiran’s story is not an isolated one. A similar pattern emerges in another case reported by TIME, this time involving Germany.
In Akalgarh, a village in Punjab, Jagdeep Kaur’s family raised nearly $8,500 for her dowry. They also gave gold, clothes and furniture, taking loans in the hope that their daughter’s marriage to Sukhminder Singh, NRI living in Hamburg, would secure her a better life abroad.
The marriage took place in 2009. Just one month later, Singh returned to Germany, where he worked at a restaurant. He promised Kaur that he would soon complete her paperwork and bring her to Europe. That promise never materialised.
Over the years, Kaur met her husband only a handful of times during his brief visits to India. Then, in 2017, she discovered the truth, Singh had another wife in Germany and two children.
“I was shocked and didn’t know what to do,” Kaur told TIME, speaking from her home in Ludhiana.
Kaur has since filed cases against Singh and his family for cruelty, fraud and cheating in a local court. Like many women in similar situations, she is still legally married, tied to a relationship that exists only on paper.
According to a petition filed in Supreme Court in 2018, more than 40,000 women may have been deceived into marrying NRI men. Between 2015 and 2019, the Indian government received over 6,000 complaints related to overseas husbands.