Maybe he is taking her at her word? From the article:
I have said "No" but being a Pakistani girl there's nothing I can do. I was even forced to marry that guy who is 15 years older than me. And I would say goodbye to everything but I have to wait for the right time. I'm being mean though, I need my family right now to support me until I finish my school. And then it will be up to me. I know I sound selfish but it's nothing compared to what they've done to me and my life. – user11743 25 mins ago
In Pakistan and other such nations, a woman disappearing and breaking contact with everybody is not as easy as it sounds. In the US a woman can do that with a very high probability of finding a job, not living in dire poverty [1] and not being raped. In Pakistan it's not remotely that easy.
[1] I'm talking about actual poverty, not US style relative poverty.
She's not in pakistan though, she's in Spain, where they have concepts like asylum for people that may be murdered if they return to their home country.
Asylum does exist, but some countries in Europe are making it harder and harder to avail oneself of the option, due to rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Spain grants only a small number of asylum requests, e.g. 230 people in 2012. Some of it is official policy, and some unofficial policy of just making it as difficult as possible to actually claim asylum and get a proper hearing. If she were in Sweden, the odds would be better.
Besides that, if she requests and receives asylum in Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Denmark, she can likely continue studying for her university degree there, even without any family support. I think Sweden might have recently restricted non-European foreigners, though--I can't recall.
All of them except Norway have restricted the free education to EU/EEA citizens, I believe. University is still free in Norway for anyone of any citizenship, although even there there is some kind of requirement to prove ability to sustain yourself (might be possible through part-time jobs). Denmark, Finland, and Sweden have all introduced tuition fees for non-EU citizens, about €8k/yr in Denmark.
However I don't know what the situation is if you receive asylum. You might be treated as domestic for education purposes in that case, since it would be in the state's interest for people granted asylum to get an education and increase their employability.
Scandinavia and Iceland are pretty much the world leaders with respect to women's rights now, and have a keen interest in their public welfare, so if I were a woman without any form of family support, in fear for my life thanks to a tradition of honor murders in my native culture, I'd rather be there than anywhere else in the world. Even if people frown at you because you're a stranger, at least they aren't killing you because they know you too well.
If she went to Sweden she would be sent back to Spain for asylum processing, there is a treaty that a refugee in EU is the responsibility of the arrival country. One of the reasons that Sweden can be generous, it's hard to get here directly.
Yeah that's true. I meant she'd be in a better situation if she had been a student at a Swedish university, rather than a student at Spanish university, not that she can move to Sweden now. Sweden gives about 15x as many asylum offers each year as Spain (~3500 people/yr vs. 230 people/yr), despite having a much smaller population, though admittedly a wealthier one. It also tends to actually follow the rules on processing applications, rather than inventing bureaucratic technicalities to prevent them from being recorded as formally filed in the first place. Spain receives a lot more immigrants than Sweden, as you note, but somehow records very few asylum applications as even submitted.
I have said "No" but being a Pakistani girl there's nothing I can do. I was even forced to marry that guy who is 15 years older than me. And I would say goodbye to everything but I have to wait for the right time. I'm being mean though, I need my family right now to support me until I finish my school. And then it will be up to me. I know I sound selfish but it's nothing compared to what they've done to me and my life. – user11743 25 mins ago
In Pakistan and other such nations, a woman disappearing and breaking contact with everybody is not as easy as it sounds. In the US a woman can do that with a very high probability of finding a job, not living in dire poverty [1] and not being raped. In Pakistan it's not remotely that easy.
[1] I'm talking about actual poverty, not US style relative poverty.