La parole est ambivalente : structurante ou aliénante. Cet article étudie les effets de l’injonction de mariage forcé sur le corps et le psychisme d’adolescentes migrantes. Des entretiens cliniques réalisés auprès de dix d’entre elles montrent que l’injonction de mariage forcé traumatise, suscite dépression, déscolarisation ou transgression.

This article examines the effects of the forced marriage injunction on ten girls. Paternal aunts ordered them to stop theirs studies and marry men chosen by their families. This extreme severity provokes hostile conflict, school demotivation, and fear to be subjected to the husband's arbitrariness. The article presents clinical data collecting and analyzing method, effects of this injunction and three profiles of emancipation.

The participants of the study are 16 to 18 year's old immigrant's girls who are recruited through an intercultural association where the author has a research contract on domestic violence. They come from African families where parental and social authority is carried by the father, mother and paternal aunt. Migratory process, as well as plural, complex even divergent cultural legacies exposes them to cumulative traumas. The injunction of forced marriage exasperates their vulnerability, weakens their psychological resources and hinders on their efforts to work through the pathogenic traces of these legacies. The author conducted four research interviews aimed at renewing the state of knowledge about adolescent processes facing the forced marriage injunction. The first two interviews aimed to create a bond of trust with the girls and clarify their problem, the third to assess their degree of vulnerability. The last aimed to study the links of descent, generational transmission and conflicts of loyalty. The analysis evaluates the quality of biopsychosocial maturation.

Effects – The aunt's injunctive speech denies the verifiable and evaluative dimension of language risks. It makes an alienating interpretation of female destiny. The adolescents live it like a cruelty that condemns them to become slaves in the social and conjugal bond. It has visibly alienated psychic conflicts into pathogenic ones, created hatred and mutual rejection. It has also created confusion in the language between aunts and nieces. The aunts are trapped in a compulsion of repetition of an obsolete custom and seem blind to their niece's request for initiation into becoming responsible and autonomous. This request has turned into a nightmare that engulfs them with anguish and fantasies of being banished, killed or sacrificed as a “fresh flesh” to the husband's arbitrary speech and behavior.

For two girls, oscillation between hope and intense depression related to multiple crisis of mental maturation has turned into depression diagnosed by a psychiatrist. But the psychiatric care, followed by psychological and social one allowed them to find a psychic balance and to resume their studies. Three girls made a positive cultural transgression. Breaking taboos and loyalty conflicts, they summoned their parents before a public authority, provoked an intercultural conflict mediated by the law and justice. They understood that the custom transgressed the rules of the palaver, discussion of a family drama or social in a space protecting the protagonists against the arbitrary of the language and the behaviors. Their transgression is thus a counter-transgression that demands to play reasonably with words, scenes and conduct to create the meaning of living together. Five girls, who conceived their problem as generational, asked for community mediation. They realized that their aunts and grandmothers cannot help them emancipate themselves because they all are caught in a compulsion to repeat an androcentric social model and its discourse that only value them as producers of boys, future soldiers, fathers or lineage continuators. This model has become unsuitable. Girls solicit grandfathers and religious leaders who are aware of this obsolescence and who are empowered by their authority and place to bring about cultural change in the community.

Language, the fundamental tool for the psychic maturation of individuals and societies, can create a pathogenic emancipation conflict between adults and adolescents and lead to devastating arbitrariness. In this context, some adolescents go through a positive cultural transgression to access the maturation of their psychic processes.