Tuesday, September 1, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
RIGHTS-BRITAIN: Government Fights Forced Marriages
Sanjay Suri
- The young woman, apparently of Bangladeshi origin, remembers the day her family tricked her. The woman who lives in Britain had secretly married a white man, but the family decided she should marry someone from back home.
"I was given all sorts of stories and sent back (home) by my parents (who also reside in Britain)," she told IPS Tuesday in a meeting arranged on advice from the Foreign Office. She did not say where she was sent from Britain. But officials made it clear that it was either Pakistan or Bangladesh.
The young woman, who also withheld her name, was lucky. She was able to contact her husband, who called the Foreign Office. The local British high commission in the country she was sent to by her parents was alerted. She was brought back and is now with her husband.
The young woman spoke to IPS the day the Foreign Office launched a key research paper on the issue of forced marriages within the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain. The study focuses on Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets in East London and on Pakistanis in Bradford in northern Britain.
The research was conducted after the Foreign Office found the problem serious enough to set up a Community Liaison Unit within the Foreign Office two years ago. This unit has encountered 450 cases of forced marriages since then, and 90 per cent of them have involved Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, Foreign Office Minister Baroness Amos told media representatives in London at the launch of the report Tuesday.
The rest were scattered cases from dozens of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Of the 450 cases, 85 per cent were women.
"We are talking here of forced marriages, and not arranged marriages," Baroness Amos said. "In an arranged marriage both have finally the right to choose," she said. "A forced marriage can mean physical pressure or emotional blackmail, and can involve physical violence, imprisonment and even rape." Two recent cases had involved forced abortions, she said.
"We are not stigmatizing Muslims, but we have to work with the cases that we find," Baroness Amos said. She added that "we have probably seen only a small proportion of the total number of cases."
The Foreign Office published a pamphlet on forced marriages and a detailed set of guidelines to the police in May this year on dealing with forced marriages. The pamphlet tells potential victims to carry British High Commission telephone numbers and money for local calls, and offers other practical advice. High commission is the name given to embassies among countries of the Commonwealth which were once a part of the British Empire.
The report says that "the major motive for families forcing their children into marriages was sexuality and independent behaviour." The two are closely linked, the report says. "Independent behaviour was exclusive to women, followed by other motives concerning family and honour."
The report says: "These young women and men had boy/girl friends, were engaged, eloped or had married, and in all of these cases, the family disapproved. Some of the liaisons were inter-ethnic, others were inter-religious and many were within the same community."
The report says: "The link between independent behaviour and sexuality was usually evidenced by young women desiring to go to university and work. Parents assumed that such behaviour would eventually result in an unacceptable relationship. Forcing them into marriage of their parents’ choice was seen as a way of pre-empting such an eventuality."
Discovery or fear of such liaisons resulted in a pretext being made for a trip to Pakistan or Bangladesh, the report says.
In all such cases, the report says, "the combination of pressure and deference to senior relatives led to children being married without their consent." A researcher is quoted in the report as saying that some Pakistani families were "disturbed by the instrumental way that their relatives treated marriage in Pakistan."
A common response among Bangladeshi and Pakistani groups to the issue of forced marriages is denial, the report says. Elderly working class men and women said the issue had been blown out of proportion by the media and that Muslims would not force someone to marry. But "denial declines across generation with both young men and women arguing that forced marriage is indeed an issue."
The report says that women are the central characters in such a marriage process. They are "not simply coerced into supporting forced marriages but can be the primary agents," the report says. "There are numerous examples where it was clearly the mother who used force against recalcitrant daughters."
The report says a lot of forced marriages arise from issues of izzat (honour) and sharm (shame). "Men’s claim to izzat is really about controlling women and their departure from the home is seen as a threat to patriarchal domination," the report says. The choice of a Muslim from another country or an inter-religious relationship raise issues of honour and shame, the report says.
Yunas Samad from the University of Bradford, co-author of the report along with John Eade from the University of Surrey told media representatives that forced marriages are often "a gut reaction to what is seen to be dishonourable behaviour." He said the way to resolve the issue would be "to work with the community and not impose solutions."
Eade said that the situation can be improved by "developing negotiations across generation and gender." People have to realise that "the old stereotype where elders tell the young what to do is changing."
Print
|
RIGHTS-BRITAIN: Government Fights Forced Marriages
Sanjay Suri
- The young woman, apparently of Bangladeshi origin, remembers the day her family tricked her. The woman who lives in Britain had secretly married a white man, but the family decided she should marry someone from back home.
(more…)
Print
|
RIGHTS-BRITAIN: Government Fights Forced Marriages
Sanjay Suri
- The young woman, apparently of Bangladeshi origin, remembers the day her family tricked her. The woman who lives in Britain had secretly married a white man, but the family decided she should marry someone from back home.
(more…)
Print
|
