My Daughter, My Property

The on-going trial of the alleged honour killing of Shafilea Ahmed and evidence given by her younger sister is a chilling reminder of what can happen to girls and women in the name of culture or religion, particularly those from a South Asian background.

Demonstrating the utterly shocking nature of this ‘cultural’ practice, the UK Forced Marriages Unit dealt with a case involving a girl who was only five years old and another of a woman who was eighty-seven! 

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Persuasion, Not Jane Austen’s

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.