Parents used staged acceptance of a boyfriend to facilitate a daughter’s removal

Evidence

But, astonishingly, when they arrived back at their house, Lina’s parents told her that they would let her see Daniel. She looked at them with a question mark over her head. “We want to meet him,” her mother said, and she asked her to invite him over. Days later, Daniel was on their doorstep, dressed up and full of polite speech, and they all had a nice time together. Lina was shocked, confused, and thrilled, believing that her parents were ready to accept Daniel in her life, but when he left, they told her that they had decided to send her again to Iraq later that summer. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 621

Categorization

• SEED: The parents’ theatrical warmth toward Daniel as a lure before shipping Lina to Iraq — a chilling case study of parental manipulation as soft coercion, angle: ‘the staged reconciliation as a control tactic.’
• XREF: Connects to the honor-and-control dynamics in Parable of the Sower and to the broader theme in this book of conservative parents disciplining daughters’ sexuality.