Mick Hartley

The issue of forced marriages hit the headlines last month with Humayra Abedin, the doctor with a Hindu boyfriend who was tricked into returning to her parents in Bangladesh and then imprisoned, drugged, and forced to marry a Muslim man, before the High Court ordered that she be released and allowed to return to London:

“I am deeply upset by what has occurred, but I do not wish my parents to suffer any punishment for what has happened,” said Abedin, who had just obtained an injunction to stop her parents removing her again. “I am their only child and they are still my parents.”

But what was once a happy family relationship is now sundered for ever. “That’s what makes resisting a forced marriage so difficult,” says Jasvinder Sanghera, author and human rights campaigner, who ran away from her home in the Midlands aged 16 to avoid being coerced into marrying a man her parents had chosen. “If you refuse your parents’ wishes, even though you know what they are doing is wrong, you end up feeling like the criminal. You are the bad daughter because you have shamed them.”

Izzat – honour – is central to many Asian families’ sense of self-worth. A key element is modesty and obedience in their daughters. Ever since she ran away, Sanghera, founder of Karma Nirvana, an advice centre in Derby that gives assistance to girls at risk of forced marriage, has felt the full force of her Sikh family’s disapproval. More than 25 years after she escaped through a window to run off with a boyfriend, her sisters cross the street when they see her. […]

The coming year, she believes, will be a watershed in our understanding of the issue. Karma Nirvana is to open its first branch office in the northeast of England. Sanghera intends to set up what she calls her Honour Network across the country. Calls will be taken by women with personal experience of violence or separation from their families.

Jasvinder Sanghera's first book, Shame, played a significant part in the increassed awareness of the problem that led to the Forced Marriage Bill. Now her second book, Daughters of Shame, has been published. India Knight reviews:

This sequel to Shame tells the stories of some of the thousands of women that Sanghera has subsequently met through Karma Nirvana, the organisation she founded in 1994 to help Asian women in similar situations: victims of forced marriage and “honour-based” violence, usually at the hands of family members, who see shame in an Asian girl touching a white boy but none in abusing, beating, raping, torturing or murdering their own flesh and blood.

Sanghera also runs a network of much-needed refuges in Derby and Stoke-on-Trent. At one point in this gripping, depressing and anger-fuelling book, she refers to a national rail company's report on track suicides. The document showed that a disproportionately high number of that year's deaths had occurred on the stretch of line that went through predominantly Asian areas such as Southall and Slough. The rate of self-destruction among young Asian women is three times the average for women of other ethnic groups. “It seems sad to me that it's not until the suicides impact on a national railway company that this is news,” the author notes drily.

When I say “young Asian women”, I mean young enough to be children: 15 is often the age at which impromptu trips to Pakistan or India are suddenly announced, and a hitherto reasonably happy, ordinary (if freedom-restricted) teenage British girl is made to marry a stranger, for the sake of izzat, or honour, “the cornerstone of the Asian community, and since the beginning of time it's been the job of girls and women to keep it polished”; this is a tough task when “so many things can tarnish it: wearing lipstick, owning a mobile phone, cutting your hair…all signs that a girl is getting westernised”.

These young women have no choice. Most British Asian families are sane enough to offer a selection of candidates to their marriageable daughters, who are allowed to say “no”, and who often go on to marry happily. But, as this book shows with horrifying clarity, there are also many families for whom the aim is simply to marry a daughter off, and if that involves beatings, rape, torture (with the whole family joining in), a slave-like degree of obedience, well – too bad. Daughters of Shame is filled with their brutal, blood-soaked, hair-raising stories. For one, it started when she was a happy, five-year-old schoolgirl and was given a beating by her older brothers because her leg had been tied to a white boy's during a three-legged race. For another, Kiren, it began with a new stepfather, who beat her and pressured her to wear the hijab. “I went to a Christian school, there were only about three Asians there. But he'd say, ‘Don't listen to your teachers, we Muslim people are different.' But I didn't want to be different like that – I didn't want to be one of those Asian women who just sit at home and cook and clean.” When Kiren ran away, only to be lured back by a trap, her mother held a knife to her throat and threatened to cut her tongue out. “My stepdad was beating me and my mum was shouting at me. She said, ‘If you don't listen to us and do as we say, your stepdad is going to rape you.'” This is by no means the worst story in the book.

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