Mick Hartley

Unbelievable. From the Telegraph:

The NHS has been urged to apologise for publishing guidance extolling the benefits of first-cousin marriage despite the increased risk of birth defects.

Guidance published last week by the NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme says first-cousin marriage is linked to “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”.

But the practice has also been linked to oppression of women and also has a proven increased risk of genetic disease in offspring of first-cousin relationships.

First cousin marriages are, of course, prevalent as a long-standing cultural tradition in Britain’s Pakistani communities. A 2005 report, commissioned by MP Ann Cryer, revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide. From that same period Dr Peter Corry, Consultant Paediatrician at Bradford Royal Infirmary, said his hospital saw so many recessive genetic illnesses that it had became a centre of excellence for the treatment of some of them. They’d identified about 140 different autosomal recessive disorders among local children: he estimated that a typical district would see 20 to 30.

Dr Patrick Nash, an expert on religious law and director of the Pharos Foundation social science research group in Oxford, called the guidance “truly dismaying”.

“Cousin marriage is incest, plain and simple, and needs to be banned with the utmost urgency – there is no ‘balance’ to be struck between this cultural lifestyle choice and the severe public health implications it incurs.

“This official article is deeply misleading and should be retracted with an apology so that the public is not misled by omission and half-truths.”

Last year Sweden, Denmark and Norway announced their intention to ban cousin marriages. And it’s not the genetic aspect they were mainly concerned about – it’s the link to cultural separation and the oppression of women. As Matthew Syed argued back in 2023, it’s a tribal institution, reinforcing separatism and cultural isolation – a problem familiar to us from northern towns where Muslim communities can tend to live in isolation from mainstream British society.

Cousin marriage, you see, is perhaps the ultimate mechanism of cultural separation. This is a point well understood by anthropologists who have studied kinship institutions around the world, from tribes to clans and lineages to biraderi. When a Tutsi marries a Tutsi, they ensure that they remain sequestered from outsiders (such as Hutus) and that their children will sustain the family tradition. The same is true in Afghanistan, which has one of the highest rates of consanguineous marriage in the world and clans that have persisted for thousands of years.

The problem, though, is that while kin marriage binds people more closely within ethnic groups, it simultaneously strengthens divides between groups — a truth noted by the British anthropologist Sir Jack Goody. This, in turn, permits the emergence of parallel values, animosities and rivalries. Joseph Henrich of Harvard has found that the higher the rate of cousin marriage in a nation, the higher the level of corruption, nepotism and poverty — and the lower the level of trust. This, of course, is the daily reality of sectarian societies from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa.

But we have to be honest enough to admit that we are seeing pockets of the same problem here in the UK and, indeed, across Europe. Again, it’s simplistic to say that this is a Pakistani problem or an Islamic one. All religions have fundamentalist and illiberal interpretations, but it is striking that they seem to mutate and spread faster in insular communities held together by “inward” marriage, perhaps because these have a tendency to become ever more detached from the moral trajectory of wider civilisation. Just look at walled-off Christian sects and millenarian cults.

And the role this all plays in keeping women hidden and sequestered in their traditional subservient roles should surely be clear enough. 

This is also worth a read:

For British Pakistanis, moving away from their hometown and leaving behind family is not easy. Many start a fresh life in the UK but eventually become fearful that they will lose their cultural values and, as a way to stay connected, they encourage or even force their children to marry back home within the family. This is an attempt to keep family ties strong and maintain family relationships.

Others will frown upon the British culture i.e. clubbing, dating, pre-marital sexual relationships and as a way to prevent their children from engaging, consanguineous marriages will take place.