At the beginning of this week, MPs were calling to criminalise forced marriages. The Government has a “forced marriage unit” which handles around 300 cases a year but The Telegraph has reported that the figure could be as high as 8,000 a year.
What a difficult issue to deal with – if you are a young person and your family is able to bully you into a forced marriage, then you are also less likely to be a person confident enough to report it to anyone. Jasvinder Sanghera, a victim of forced marriage, set up a helpline by founding a charity, Karma Nirvana. Last year, they received 4,815 calls and 63% of them were from callers who had not reported their situation to the police, teachers or doctors.
I have no immediate experience of forced marriages – however, I know a lot of people, who (in my opinion) were coerced into their marriages – is this the same thing? Fortunately marrying first cousins is a practice that no longer takes place in my community, but it does still happen. Aren’t all of those marriages slightly forced – who grows up dreaming of marrying their cousin?
My sister had a friend at university who had this choice (she was a beautiful post-grad): either marry a cousin who was a graduate but she did not find him attractive; or marry a cousin who was better looking but worked in his dad’s taxi rank. And just in case you think “why didn’t she consider option 3: none of the above” – well, it was made very clear to her that if she did that, her younger sister would not be allowed to go to university.
Bubbly
The Chatterjis Blog 