British tolerance of forced unions wanes

In a drafty railway station cafe in England's Midlands, Ayesha, a young Muslim girl whose family is from Pakistan, is trying not to cry as she talks about her wedding day.

"When I was young I always expected to have an arranged marriage," she says. "But I also thought that I'd get a chance to know the man first."

Instead, at 17, her family forced her to marry a man she had never met. When Ayesha, not her real name, tried to have the marriage annulled, she was disowned by her family, and forced to flee her hometown of Birmingham.

Although every year hundreds of Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu women in Britain, according to figures from the government and aid agencies, are forced into marriage to fulfill traditional ideas of family honor or parental prestige, Britain's government has so far been reluctant to interfere in the private lives of immigrants.

But now, following the London subway and bus bombings on July 7, the government is proposing new laws that would specifically criminalize forcing others into marriage. And calls for the ban have grown as Britain attempts to integrate its insular Muslim communities into the mainstream in an effort to temper extremism.

"In Britain we are proud of our cultural diversity," said Baroness Scotland, a Home Office minister who started talks on the proposal earlier this month. "But even a sensitive appreciation of cultural differences cannot allow abuse to go unchallenged."

Shaminder Ubhi, director of the Ashiana Project, one of several London refuges for Asian and Middle Eastern women fleeing domestic violence, says that about 300 women looking for help come to them every year. "And around 60 percent say that forced marriage is one of the issues they are escaping from."

But some say that new legislation specifically targeting minorities will only increase feelings of persecution, and that the worst cases of forced marriages can be dealt with under existing laws against rape and kidnap.

"There is already enough legislation. We prefer to say it's a cultural and not a religious thing and to abolish the practice that way," says Reefat Drabu, of the controversial Muslim Council of Britain's Social and Family Affairs Committee. "The media use the issue to demonize the Muslim community. And the problem is diminishing anyway."

But in Derby, a city where Britain's growing racial divide is most apparent, the problem is far from diminishing. "The cases sound barbaric but they happen every single day," says Jasvinder Sanghera, who runs Karma Nirvana, a shelter in Derby for Asian women fleeing forced marriages and abusive husbands.

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