A shotgun wedding is a variety of
forced marriage that is arranged to avoid embarrassment due to an unplanned
pregnancy, rather than out of the desire of the participants. The phrase is an
American colloquialism, though it is also used in other parts of the world, based on a supposed scenario (usually
hyperbole) that the
father of the pregnant
daughter, almost by accepted custom, must resort to using coercion (such as threatening with a
shotgun) to ensure that the man who impregnated her follows through with the wedding, sometimes even following the couple to the altar to prevent his escape.
The use of duress or violent coercion to marry is no longer common in the U.S., although many anecdotal stories and folk songs record instances of such coercion in 18th- and 19th-century America. Often a couple will arrange a shotgun wedding without explicit outside encouragement, and some religious teachings consider it a
moral imperative to marry in that situation.
One purpose of such a wedding can be to get recourse from the male for the act of
impregnation; another reason is to ensure that the child is raised by both
parents. In some cases, as in early America and in the
Middle East, a major objective was the restoring of social
honor to the
mother. The practice is also a
loophole method of preventing the birth of legally
illegitimate children or, if the marriage occurs early enough, to conceal that conception occurred before marriage. In some societies, the
stigma attached to
pregnancy out of wedlock can be enormous, and coercive means (in spite of the legal defense of
undue influence) for gaining recourse are often seen as the prospective father-in-law's "right", and an important, albeit unconventional,
coming of age event for the young father-to-be.
The phenomenon has become less common as the stigma associated with out-of-wedlock births has declined and the number of such births has increased; the increasing availability of
abortion has also reduced the perceived need for such measures by allowing an unintended
pregnancy to be readily terminated.
Sometimes a woman who marries while pregnant, regardless of the situation, is simply referred to as a "shotgun
bride".
In Japan, the slang term 出来ちゃった結婚
dekichatta kekkon (a marriage necessitated by an unplanned pregnancy) emerged in the late 1990s with a very similar meaning, although the etymology of the term in Japanese does not imply the same threat of physical violence that the English idiom "shotgun marriage" does. The term
dekichatta kekkon can be loosely translated as an "oops marriage" or an "it's-already-happened-marriage".
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_marriage
最后由 沅芷澧兰 于 2009-06-26 11:56:28编辑
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an easy way to make money ,uh?
