Mick Hartley

After escaping home at the age of 15 to avoid a forced marriage, Jasvinder Sanghera set up Karma Nirvana, a chain of refuge and advice centres for south Asian women fleeing domestic abuse and the spectre of “honour killings”. There’s a lengthy excerpt from her forthcoming book Shame in the Sunday Times today. She’s also interviewed:

A lot of the hate comes from some members of her own family: 26 years after she ran away they still cross the street to avoid her. Her only real contact is her nephew Sunny. “He’s hip, he’s modern, but he still says, ‘If I get married I wouldn’t want my wife to speak to you’.”

She shakes her head in disbelief. “But then if you look at the recent BBC poll for the Asian network they asked 15 to 24-year-olds if they could justify an honour killing, and more than 50% said they could.”

Fighting back has become a life’s work and Sanghera, now 41, has turned from counsellor to campaigner. “Awful things happen all the time: 30% of those taken abroad for forced weddings are underage and I see girls who are taken to India and raped to conceive a child to make their marriage work. I worked with a girl recently who suffered horrific abuse with her new family and kept running home to her parents. The third time she ran home her own father stabbed her three times. In the end we had to relocate her and change her identity because the fear is always that they will seek them out.”

Her list of horror stories goes on and on. “If you came to Derby I could introduce to more than 50 women today who have run away, and they’re the lucky ones. But when people read stories about honour killings they think the suffering is isolated and rare because the cases seem so dramatic, but it’s not true. It is widespread.” And though honour killings grab the headlines, she points out that “the suicide rate for young Asian women is three times the national average”.

On Friday the House of Lords will debate a private member’s bill sponsored by Lord Lester, the Liberal Democrat human rights champion, that would offer victims of forced marriage the right to seek civil remedies. Sanghera wants more.

“I don’t think the government is getting tough enough on forced marriage. At the Labour party conference they promised they would be revisiting the issue, but there was nothing in the Queen’s speech, and even yesterday when I was at the House of Lords for a meeting of Asian peers there were people in the audience saying, ‘Do we really need this?’” “We’re in denial about this even being an issue,” says Sanghera. “But we have to start seeing this as a UK problem. This PC culture we have created here is a nightmare. Forced marriage isn’t an issue of cultural understanding. It’s about people abusing other people. So why not face facts? We know forced marriage happens across a number of communities, but the figures tell us they are predominantly south Asian, so let’s not get all PC about things. It doesn’t help.”

She finds the race row ignited by Celebrity Big Brother typical in missing the point yet again. “There are so many bigger concerns. I don’t understand why we can’t have a properly important and honest discussion about race in this country.”

The problem, of course, is that the community most blighted by the issue is the one most resistant to tackling it. “Change has to come from the leaders of the Asian community. I know I’ll still be fighting it when I die.”