UK: The Invisibles

Each year, it is believed, thousands of young British Asian women are forced into marriages against their will. Those who resist face ostracism – or far worse. So why do we hear so little about them?

The All Women’s Centre in Luton is a small brick building set back from the main road. They like it like this, say the women who work there, because it’s hidden away. Although they offer advice on everything from welfare and childcare to exercise classes and language lessons, almost all the women who use the centre have been affected by forced marriage. There is a poster about forced marriage on the wall, and security locks on the door.

They hear all sorts of stories here, from women who have been sent abroad to marry a cousin, been raped and realised the only way to get home to the UK is to get pregnant, to grandmothers who have brought up five children and quietly admit at a coffee morning that they were forced into marriage when they were 16. When the All Women’s Centre tried to set up a support group for domestic abuse, it immediately encountered difficulties. “When you have a tight-knit community like the Asian community here, people don’t come forward,” says Sarita Jain, who helps to run the centre. “Bring them to a coffee morning, and the same issues we wanted to explore in a support group would come out there.”

Luton was once voted the UK’s “crappest town”, which seems a little unfair. Its latest distinction is that this week its Asian community was thrust into the spotlight over the issue of forced marriage, until now as hidden from national attention as it was in the groups in which it occurs. A study by Dr Nazia Khanum, who chairs several community groups in Luton, showed that the number of forced marriages had been greatly underestimated. Each year, the Forced Marriage Unit, set up by the government in 2005, helps around 300 British people (85% of them women) taken abroad for marriage, but Khanum believes the true figure may be 4,000.

“There could be more,” she says. “The data collection is appalling and we’re never going to see the whole picture until it is improved. Maybe we will never know how prevalent it is, but at least we can get some idea if we monitor it properly.” What is known is that the majority of women forced into marriage have roots in South Asia, although it also happens in Somali, Turkish, Kurdish, Nigerian and Chinese communities. With victims among Hindus, Sikhs and Christians, as well as Muslims, it is not an issue of religion but of tradition, and the idea that a family’s “honour” rests on the shoulders of the women.

Forced marriage was once taken quite seriously by Luton’s authorities – the Bengali Women’s Project, a community group, had a dedicated adviser on forced marriage, paid for by the council, but the post was abolished a few years ago in funding cuts. Naseem Khan, who works at the All Women’s Centre, has her salary guaranteed only until next year, even though she has a wealth of experience of dealing with women who have been through or are threatened with forced marriages. “We are living hand to mouth,” she says.

“It’s all very well having the Forced Marriage Unit and lots of legislation and guidelines, but hardly anybody knew about these things,” says Margaret Moran, MP for Luton South, who commissioned Khanum’s report after seeing 100 young women a year (and some men) who were victims of forced marriage. “And what’s the use anyway if there isn’t community-based support for people when they need it? We’re going backwards on that rather than forwards. I’m trying to persuade the government to spend much less time and money [on legislation]. They need to put their money where their mouth is now.”

Almost 20% of Luton’s population is of Asian origin, mosly from Pakistan. “Some families here are stuck in a time trap,” says a shopkeeper in the largely Asian district of Bury Park. “The parents want to practise the customs of the south Asia they left in the 60s. They don’t realise that India and Pakistan have moved on since then.” There are signs, says Khan, that second-generation British Asians are more prepared to stand up to their parents, but this is where conflict arises; before, women would quietly go along with the marriage.

Forced marriage is often used to “correct” some kind of behaviour that a family is not happy about, including drug and alcohol use, promiscuity, having a boyfriend from another ethnic background, or the fear that a teenage daughter has become too “westernised”. It is inextricably linked to bullying, suicide (rates among young British Asian women are three times the national average) and “honour” violence, including murder. There have been a number of horrific cases in recent years. Banaz Mahmod, a 19-year-old Kurdish-born woman from south London, had been forced into marriage when she was 16, but left her husband and started a relationship with another man. She told police that her father had threatened to kill her and gave them a list of names of local men she feared he would hire to do the job, but they didn’t listen. Her body was found buried in a garden in Birmingham; she had been strangled with a shoelace and packed into a suitcase. In January, a coroner ruled that Shafilea Ahmed, 17, from Warrington, had been murdered – she was found next to a river in 2004 – but nobody has been charged. The inquest was told that she had tried to run away before, telling a local youth support service that she feared her parents would force her into a marriage (they have denied this) and, on a trip to Pakistan, drank bleach in an apparent suicide attempt.

Shazia Qayum, 28, who grew up in Birmingham, knows some of what they have been through: she was forced to marry her cousin when she was 17. “It started when I was 15. I came back from school one day and my mother showed me a picture of my cousin in Pakistan and said I was going to marry him. I was told that saying no wasn’t an option and that if I did, I wouldn’t be allowed to finish my education.” She was taken out of school anyway, and her parents kept her imprisoned at home. “I didn’t think they would be able to get away with it. I thought the school authorities or social services would come looking for me, but nobody did. I remember once a friend came round, asking where I was, and I heard my father tell her that I was in Pakistan, but I was in a back room.”

Qayum was kept at home for a year, then her parents stopped talking about the marriage and she thought perhaps they had changed their minds. She was allowed to get a job in a factory, and when she was 17, she was told the family was going on a holiday to Pakistan. “I was born and raised in Britain,” she says. “I had never even been abroad, so I was quite excited. We got there, and a wedding was being planned. I asked who was getting married and my parents said: ‘You.’ ” They told her she would be disowned and left in Pakistan if she refused, and that her grandfather was ill and it would be her fault if he died.

“I went ahead with the marriage,” she says, “but I told my now ex-husband that my parents had forced me to marry him. He said he didn’t care, that he just wanted to come to the UK. My parents left me in Pakistan and said the only way I could come home was if I sponsored my husband’s visa.” She was allowed to return to the UK before him, and started working, saving money in a secret bank account. She wrote to immigration officials saying she didn’t want her husband to be given a visa and that she had been forced into the marriage, but her letters were never acknowleged.

“When he came over, I realised I had two choices: to live a lie to keep my parents happy, or to leave and live my life.” She called the police, who escorted her out of her home, but their support ended there. “They told me to make my own way; I had no idea where to go.” For five years, Qayum lived in refuges, moving because her father was following her. She now runs the young persons’ team at Karma Nirvana, a support service for victims of forced marriage and “honour” violence, and her family have disowned her. “I’m dead to my family,” she says.

In Luton, as elsewhere, there is a shocking lack of support for women who find themselves in Qayum’s situation. A few get places at a specialist refuge for Asian women run by Luton Women’s Aid, but last year this was able to accommodate only 34 women. What happens to the rest? Sometimes they are forced to go back home, or are helped by friends. “Sometimes we never know,” says Jenny Moody, who set up the refuge 12 years ago. “We thought it would take a while to fill up, but within a week we were full,” she says. “And we’ve been full ever since. I’ve seen so many women frightened of what would happen to them if they were made to go home. And it is real fear.” She has seen cars full of men – husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, in-laws – driving around trying to find the refuge.

Last year, Luton Women’s Aid helped 179 women in connection with forced marriage. Often, these women will not go to the police or social services because they don’t trust them or they are too frightened. “We have very strict laws on confidentiality; they don’t have to tell us their name or address,” says Moody. “We will attempt to encourage them to go to the police, but not all do.”

Some police officers are not as understanding as they could be, she says. She remembers one instance when a woman’s passport had been taken and locked away by her family. This was reported as a theft, and the woman even told the police which cupboard it was locked in. When the police went round, however, the woman’s father said she was lying and the complaint wasn’t taken any further.

One of the problems Moody has come across is that some women from repressive backgrounds are kept in the dark about the realities of the rest of the world. “You can explain English laws to them, and how they can achieve freedom, but this is meaningless unless they actually know what freedom means,” she says. “I remember asking one woman what she thought love meant, and she said, ‘It means doing what your family and husband tell you to do.’ ”

Jasvinder Sanghera, who escaped a forced marriage herself, runs Karma Nirvana, which is based in Derby but gets calls from all over the UK. The organisation takes 15 new cases a week relating to forced marriage and “honour” violence. “It’s not an exaggeration to say there are thousands of victims and thousands of potential victims of forced marriages,” she says.

Last week, the home affairs select committee into forced marriage and “honour” violence was told that 33 children in Bradford alone could not be traced after disappearing from school records. The fear is that at least some of these have been victims of forced marriage.

“I’m sure that hundreds of girls have been removed from school. This time of year is particularly dangerous, with parents preparing to take girls overseas during the summer holidays,” says Diana Nammi, director of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation. “We work with schools and provide teachers with training and information.” She says she is aware of girls going missing from schools she has worked with, but “The government and education authorities are not following these cases up.” It is obviously a sensitive subject, and none of the schools I contacted would talk to me.

“If an Asian child goes missing, I do not believe that their case would be investigated as fully as if a non-Asian child fell off the school roll,” says Sanghera. “I’ve heard teachers say they think it is part of the child’s culture to be taken abroad for an extended length of time; they think they are being culturally sensitive. But I had this girl who was 12 when she was taken out of school, taken to Pakistan when she was 14, forced to marry, and raped. She came back to the UK and gave birth to a child in this country, as a minor. Nobody ever asked her any questions about her situation. I believe that of these unaccounted-for children, there will be victims of forced marriages. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

There are some signs that the government is taking forced marriage seriously. This autumn, the Forced Marriage Act will allow courts to intervene if someone makes a complaint that they are being forced into a marriage. The select committee on forced marriage and honour violence is also expected to report its findings soon. But whatever new legislation is passed, campaigners repeatedly say that it is no good if the women it is intended to help have no idea that it is there.

Khanum made a wide range of recommendations in her report. “Many schools and colleges,” she says, “have to really pull their socks up and detect signs that a young woman is being forced into a marriage – such as depression, truancy, a downturn in her grades – and find out why. GPs don’t ask why a woman might be depressed and just prescribe antidepressants.”

There also needs to be more funding for dedicated workers and counsellors. “You have to educate parents, because so much of this goes on behind closed doors,” says Khanum. “If a neighbour is bullying his daughter, how would I know if all I see is him being very polite and considerate outside the home? Educating parents is vital, and especially men, because it is predominantly men who are the perpetrators – they have to be influenced. They may not even know that they are breaching the laws of this country.”

Raising the age of compulsory education to 18 could help, as it would buy young women time and help them to become more self-confident, but this would only work if schools and colleges followed up absences. Agencies need to be trained to have a greater understanding of the issues: Khanum says some have sought help from community or religious leaders, believing this to be the culturally sensitive thing to do, whereas it often placed the women in more danger.

Sanghera, meanwhile, believes there needs to be a distinct criminal offence of forced marriage. The government did consider this, but decided not to legislate; one of the reasons given was that women wouldn’t want to criminalise their parents and it would force the practice underground. The fact is, forced marriage is already largely underground. Sanghera sees the criminalisation of forced marriage as parallel to the introduction of domestic violence legislation.

“We had the same debate with that: people were saying, ‘It won’t work, women won’t want to get their partners into trouble.’ But we created legislation, empowered victims, raised awareness, put in special measures. The same would apply to forced marriage. It would create the recognition that this is a crime; I have never met a victim who believed that what was happening to them was against the law. You are groomed into understanding that your life is mapped out for you. You’re not thinking, ‘It is against the law for you to do this to me.’ Making forced marriage a crime in itself would send out a strong message of unacceptability.”

It is time, she says, to put aside what some people believe is cultural sensitivity and start seeing forced marriage and “honour” violence as the crimes that they are. “I’ve met well-intentioned police officers, teachers and GPs who have a fear of getting it wrong and a fear of being called racist. There is so much denial. I can cope with denial in the community – they can get on with it – but I can’t cope with denial from those statutory agencies that have a responsibility to treat these women the same way they would treat any other”.

Karma Nirvana can be reached at karmanirvana.org.uk

Source: The Guardian – 14 March 2008