Forced marriage still draws journalists, but is it time for a new conclusion?
Last Sunday’s Telegraph carried a solid piece on forced marriage by Cyrus Shahrad.
Women who escape forced marriages.
The piece includes testimony from victims and key workers in the field, including Jasvinder Sanghera (Karma Nirvana), Zena (previously of Jack and Zena) and Olaf Henricson-Bell (Forced Marriage Unit).
As such it is a very competent, standard-issue piece on forced marriage. The conclusions at the end are also very familiar to anyone who follows this subject:
Yet some, including Jasvinder Sanghera, believe there’s still much to be done. She’s lobbying David Cameron to make good on his electoral promise to criminalise forced marriage (the statutory guidelines of the 2008 Forced Marriage Civil Protection Act carry no penalty to enforce implementation, and the affiliated protection orders can lead to under-age victims being returned to their families, which she says is ‘very worrying’).
Others claim that victims are still falling into gaps between government policy and practice: Bita Ghaedi, for example, whom the Home Office has been trying to deport since she arrived in Britain without a passport in October 2006, having fled a man she was forced to marry in Tehran.
The big forced marriage campaigners habitually target agencies of the British state (the Government, the courts, the Police, social services) and lobby them for improvements in service provision to victims or more effective legal remedies. Reading these kind of reports, one would be forgiven for thinking that the key to solving the problems of forced marriage lies with the British state.
It actually lies with the communities where these problems originate.
Although state and voluntary agencies must strive to provide the best possible services for victims, there will come a point when they can do no more. The law of diminishing returns applies to campaigning in this area as it does everywhere else, and over the last 5 years a great deal has been achieved. If the Conservatives deliver on their promise to criminalise forced marriage (fingers crossed), there is literally no more that Government can offer in terms of legislation. What will e.g. Jasvinder Sanghera campaign on after that?
The time is rapidly approaching when campaigners will have to turn their attention to preventative measures rather than treatments.
MixTogether’s ongoing attempt to get some recognition of marriage issues within Asian broadcast media is one of the first preventative campaigns by any group. Eventually all campaigners will have to admit that the problem lies not with Britain but with certain unwelcome cultural imports from South Asia and other countries that need to be confronted at source and removed.
