Saying the driver is to retain the family lineage does not seem to quite fit.

It would have been better if someone like Louis Theroux (if only he spoke urdu!) had presented this.

after all, if you don’t think consent is necessary, perhaps you don’t think civilised behaviour is necessary either.

they all go hand in hand, in case you hadn’t noticed. the kind of mindset that thinks a woman has no rights, is hardly not going to beat her up too.

but actually, to be fair, its not always the husbands. there are many cases in the indian subcontinent, where women (we dont call it Forced Marriage much because so many are “arranged marriages with not much option left for the girl, and no FMU unit and little chance of an independent life without family’s approval, and you don’t even need to bring violence into the equation, just a few hints) are tortured by their mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, and commit suicide to escape that. husbands are not that significant necessarily.

so you see – what’s screwy is the WHOLE FAMILY dynamic. she has effectively been sold to the family, not the man. these FM things are significant in as much as its not the union between the man and the woman that’s significant, its the union of families and keeping up the old tribal ways

So in this respect I guess forced marriage is just a brutally clumsy way of marrying off men which no sane woman would willingly touch with a barge pole…

we have heard lots of talk about ‘shelters’ – (and laws) but that’s front-line stuff only, certainly very important, but let’s think more of what will need to be sustained down the road. self belief, self valuing, self esteem. what kind of life can one of these girls look forward to? ok so first of all its clear they’d have to earn their own living, and make their own social connections, and that’s clearly the really hard bit, every girl will no doubt think, all the other [girls in my community] are conforming, if i don’t – i will be an outcast. what ‘community’ will accept me? these are the people i belong to. who will i look to for social support then? she may well have heard the likes of Ashik and co. who say, well you have forsaken your community, who will help you now? these are the really scary things. Peer support, and support networks – are going to be crucial – and if someone feels they are literally the only one doing it, well that’s going to be pretty impossible. i think one of the positive things that comes out of all this attention on FM – is perhaps that people realise they aren’t alone. it has to be visible, and the few women who are brave enough to tell their stories – kudos to them. they have managed to make that step, and a lot to offer to future people in the same situation.

these are the kinds of things that as young teenagers/young adults are really difficult to think about.

nesrine – great article. its so easily and too often overlooked that the immense difficulty of these situations is the being between the ‘devil and the deep blue sea’ for the girls. stay in the marriage, or deal with the repercussions for leaving the marriage.

there are no easy choices, certainly there are extreme consequences of taking either road. if they escape (like leaving MI5 or sth, hah ive been watching spooks) that’s it – no connection to the ‘old life’ for them. having the belief that is worth doing that and that life will carry on – is extremely difficult and requires a lot of self-belief and self-value, which girls are certainly not encouraged to feel, not for themselves anyway, but more of their value to their family.

little suprise there are so many suicides. that is consistently what we see the road many women in this situation take.

this is what we have gone on and on about every time we have talked about forced marriage here over the last year or so -some of which got quite heated. te social and emotional issues. why just telling women what rights they have and how they can send their parents to prison isn’t going to make the problem go away, (though it is a very important step of course) the social barriers to take-up of one’s legal rights is the big issue.

until the huge complicating factor of the underlying emotional blackmail issue is recognised for what it is, nothing is going to change magically for those women/girls who find themselves in this situation.

of course the legal aspect is a very important corollary issue, but simply that. as nesrine puts it, it is the necessary legal framework, but the ‘social’ framework is what is really significant for these girls.
after all, that’s why so many forced marriages don’t actually need to involve threat of violence, because of the threat of ostracisation.

unless and until ‘defiance’ comes to seen to be more acceptable, and not ‘family-destroying’ than it is now in these contexts, the problem will continue. of course people don’t want to deal with this – because it’s difficult to talk about it without getting the ‘culture-happy’ ‘how dare you insult our community’ types all in arms. the hold one’s family has over one, isn’t going to go away magically. without being able to criticise it, its certainly not going to go anywhere. its one of the most difficult social change issues as well – given its your family, and that has major psychological implications.

and no its not just a pakistani muslim issue in as much as it comes out of the traditional cultural norms of the many groups found in the indian subcontinent and many other places.

My ears still hurt though.

While the documentary was a good one, it would have been nice if it had given more background to the issue of forced marriage. For those of us who knew a lot about it already, it was excellent, but I am not sure that the average viewer would have fully grasped the nature of the problem (such as the problems of criminalising focred marriage, etc.).

Hat tip to Rumbold and Leon.

P.