http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5097
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3575
by Lee Hancock
Imagine the scenario: A white Christian religious group is found to be forcing girls as young as nine into marriages, often to their first cousins, where they are repeatedly sexually abused. The authorities do nothing.
A scandal of massive proportions obviously, and much rightful outrage would ensue in the nation’s press. Does the scenario sound too preposterous to be true? Tragically, this http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4927 is happening in Britain and it is being ignored.
Official figures released from the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit have shown that 60 children aged 15 or under have been rescued by the unit in the past four years. It helped rescue 58 children since it conception in January 2005, with 11 children under the age of 16 being rescued already this year. The youngest http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5238 was 13.But according to the unit, these figures are just the tip of the iceberg. Large numbers of children are disappearing to be forced into marriages overseas. A Commons all-party Home Affairs Select Committee set up to look into the subject found that 2,089 children were unaccounted for in just 14 local council areas of England and Wales. Four children under the age of 16 phone the unit’s hotline each month. A third of all their enquiries come from under 18’s.
So why isn’t this http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5494 practice by this religious group headline news? A clue can be found in the case of the youngest victim the unit had to rescue. It managed to bring back to Britain an 11 year old girl who had been taken to Dhaka in Bangladesh last year after the child’s parents had agreed to her marriage to a local man.
The youngest case the unit has had to deal with is a nine year-old girl from a Pakistani family in the East Midlands who told a teacher that she was to be forced into a marriage. The teacher didn’t believe her and did nothing. The child was ultimately taken in care.
Jasvinder Sanghera, director of Karma Nirvana, a charity that deals with forced marriages, said that the problem was particularly prevalent in Pakistani communities, where betrothing offspring to first cousins was common practice.
http://www.bnp.org.uk/2008/09/girls-as-young-as-9-being-forced-into-islamic-marriages/