IN THE coming months the Home Office will outline proposals to make it a criminal offence to force someone to marry. Pressure has been steadily mounting for such an offence: police in London recently demanded extra powers to prevent forced marriages, estimating that about 500 had taken place in the capital in the past two years. The national figure is far higher.

At the same time the police are reviewing 109 murders over the past ten years to see whether any could be honour killings. Such murders, which are on the increase and are committed by the victims’ families, are linked with forced marriages, women who reject chosen partners or have relationships outside their close-knit, mostly Asian, communities. The suicide rate among Asian females aged 16 to 24 is also nearly three times the national average. Not all victims are women, however: 15 per cent of forced marriages involve young men.

The move is controversial: some say that it will deter women from coming forward if they think that their families will face prosecution. Either way, the proposals are the latest in what has been a successful and concerted campaign since 1999, when the Home Office set up a working group to investigate the problem. That led to a joint action plan with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) that in January was relaunched with the Home Office as the Forced Marriage Unit.

Fawzia Samad, a caseworker with the unit and before that with the FCO’s community liaison unit that preceded it, said: “Most of these girls were being taken overseas and being forced into marriage. They then turned up at the British High Commission in Islamabad or Delhi. Officials and police would say: ‘Why come to us? This is a family matter.’ Only now is it being looked at as a human rights issue.”

The initiative has changed attitudes. Now, she says, there is widespread recognition that a forced, as opposed to an arranged, marriage is likely to involve a series of crimes, including abduction, kidnap, assault and domestic violence generally and rape. She describes the case of Narina and her two sisters who were recently inveigled into going to Pakistan. “She suspected that marriage was in the offing but her mother swore that nothing would happen. Once there, the two older daughters were told that they had to marry and that if they refused, they would not be returning to Britain. They resisted and after six months managed to escape from the house where they were being held while the family were at a funeral and made their way through the countryside to the nearest town and to British High Commission, where officials secured their return.”

Often in such cases the girls cannot escape and one of the tasks of the unit, which is part of the consular service, is to try to locate them. The girls are often taken to remote villages, perhaps where they cannot speak the language, and deprived of their passports. The unit files petitions for habeas corpus in the High Court of the region where the girl is held, requiring the family to produce her within 48 hours. However, to serve the writ her address must be known.

The procedure has worked but it depends crucially on the girl being prepared to speak up in court to say that she is being forcibly held. Not all will do that. Of one dozen petitions filed, only three girls have spoken up, Samad says. Where she can be located, staff also go on “rescue missions”, where they go to the house and ask the girl whether she is being held against her will and remove her.

But this “weapon of choice” cannot be used with underage victims — now 30 per cent of cases. Here, the unit applies to have the girls made wards of court. Although the wardship jurisdiction does not stretch to India or Pakistan, papers can be served on a family member in the UK, requiring girls aged 16-18 to be brought to the local High Commission or returned to Britain or the family member will face arrest.

Where an adult is held, and her whereabouts are unknown, the problem is more difficult. But here, too, there has been progress: a recent ruling by Mr Justice Singer — who has been at the forefront in seeking solutions to forced marriage — means that the wardship jurisdiction now also extends to adults not capable of giving informed consent, so it can be used where a woman suffers, for instance, from learning disabilities and cannot know what a forced marriage is.

The unit tackles 250 cases a year but Samad estimates that for each one there are perhaps six that they never hear of. “Every girl knows a sister, a friend or cousin — a conservative estimate would put it at more than 1,000 cases a year.”

Not all forced marriages take place abroad. The unit has drawn up guidelines for police officers, teachers, other educational professionals and social services, alerting them to the warning signs of a girl — or boy — who may be the potential or actual victim of a forced marriage, telling them what steps to take. Schools may notice that they are subject to an increasingly restrictive regime, changing before they return home into traditional dress or, in one case, crying at the end of term “because school is the only freedom they have”, Samad says. If the person is at risk of being forced to go abroad, the agencies can also prevent that happening or ensure that there are safeguards and contacts in place. Several agencies may need to be involved. “The whole idea is prevention.”

Finally, lawyers in Britain need to be alert to a simple legal fact: marriages abroad recognised by the Government of that country are recognised in Britain. “Many lawyers think that if a girl has been forced into a marriage abroad, it is not valid, or the girls think they can just go to an imam and have the marriage annulled. But they do require a proper divorce — otherwise they marry again and a whole host of other legal problems arise.” This, and other legal aspects of forced marriage, are the subject of a legal handbook to be issued by the unit later this year. “We have made a lot of progress — now we need to make sure that the high street solicitor in, say Derby, is fully aware of the legal ramifications of forced marriage and divorce.”

Forced Marriage Unit: fmu@fco.gov.uk
020-7008 0135

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