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- Author, Natasha Turney
- Author title, BBCNews
Isolated and alone, Sara says she felt helpless when the husband she was forced to marry in Pakistan became abusive. He was 21 years old.
“He would put a lighter in my face to scare me and say, ‘I’m going to burn you,'” he says.
She claims her controlling behavior worsened when she was brought to the UK and moved in with his parents in 2022.
Instead of the happy married life that her family had promised her, she was attacked by her husband and forced to work as a slave by her in-laws.
A forced marriage occurs when one or both people do not give their consent and they are forced into the marriage through pressure or abuse.
An International Labor Organization report in 2021, the latest year for which figures are available, found that around 22 million people worldwide were involved in forced marriage.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, one in five women marry or enter into a relationship before the age of 18, more often in informal partnerships without official registration than in formal marriages, according to 2023 data from Unicef.
However, the organizations emphasize that the actual incidence of forced marriage is likely much higher than estimates suggest.
It was banned in the UK in 2014 under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act and is punishable by up to seven years in prison.
According to the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales, there were 30 trials for the offense last year, resulting in 16 convictions.
However, charities such as Karma Nirvana, which helps women affected by forced marriages in this country, say the prosecution rate does not reflect the true scale of the matter or the actual number of victims.
The charity, based in Derby, England, said it received 624 calls to its helpline last year, almost three times as many as the 229 recorded by the Home Office’s Forced Marriage Unit.
“They will rape you”
To protect her identity, we have changed Sara’s name and are not disclosing where she has been taken in the UK.
It was the first time that Sara was in the country that she knew little about and did not speak the language.
She remembers family and friends reassuring her that she would enjoy a “better life” and that their marriage seemed like a good marriage for a few weeks.
“Then the restrictions gradually began: ‘Don’t go out, don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t work, stay home alone,’” Sara remembers.
She adds that she was told that she would be raped or murdered by the British if she ever left the marital home.
“They told me I wasn’t allowed to go out in the UK and that they would rape me if I did it alone. ‘Don’t go out alone, day or night,’ they insisted,” the woman says.
Despite resistance, Sarah suddenly found herself living a life of bondage.
She claims that her mother-in-law forced her to do housework and did not allow her to leave the house. He described her as a “maid” and “servant,” she adds.
Her situation worsened when her husband became physically violent.
“Sometimes he would throw something at me, he would push me. Sometimes he would kick me,” he says.
“He grabbed me by the neck”
The situation became even more unbearable when she realized that her husband and his family had turned it off WiFi from your phone.
Unable to contact her friends and family at home, scared and alone, she said she mustered up the courage to ask her husband why she couldn’t connect her phone to wireless internet.
The consequences were devastating.
She claims he angrily threw the TV remote and keys at her and hit her in the face.
“He grabbed me by the neck. He pushed me against the wall. He hit me in the head three or four times,” he says.
He felt like he was suffocating and thought he was going to die.
And she also remembers how her mother-in-law, who witnessed everything, insisted that she should have remained silent.
“That night my husband slept near the door so I wouldn’t leave,” she says.
Sara remembers how frightened she was after the attack, which she says left her face swollen.
“So I don’t know how I did it, but at six in the morning, after crying and thinking all night, I called the police,” she explains.
Five minutes later, Sara heard the officers knock on the door.
She remembers one of them going up the stairs and into her room and finding her curled up in the corner.
“When he arrived and saw me, I was shaking very much. I was cold, my heart was beating very fast and my blood pressure was dropping,” he remembers.
Police took her out of the house and took her to a hostel in Leeds, a city in northern England. It was December 2022.
Sara’s husband was arrested, but she claims she didn’t want to take action because she was worried about her family’s safety in Pakistan. He was not accused of any crime.
Finally, Sara divorced her abusive husband in July last year.
She says she doesn’t want to return to Pakistan because divorced women are stigmatized there and she fears she would be forced to remarry.
“What happens with family members is that they remarry you one way or another,” he explains.
He is now a permanent resident of the UK, learning English and rebuilding his life in Derbyshire in the English Midlands.
Sara urges those who engage in forced marriages to stop.
“With a forced marriage, you ruin the other person’s life,” he says.
“Not only a woman’s life is ruined, but men’s too. We should first think about it, see it, understand it.”
Sara is one of many victims of forced marriage living in the UK. There are currently no reliable figures on how many people are affected.
To change this, the Home Office announced that it will conduct a prevalence study looking at the prevalence of forced marriage as part of a series of measures to combat honor abuse.
The ministry has worked with a team of professors from the University of Nottingham and the University of Birmingham to develop a data tool to carry out this process.
“We recommend to the government the importance of having up-to-date data,” says Professor Helen McCabe, whose work at the University of Nottingham specializes in political theory.
McCabe says this will be the first prevalence study of its kind in England and Wales and could help find out how many people are affected, whether forced marriage is increasing and how policy could be changed to reduce it.
“Unless we know how many people are affected or have baseline data on how many people are involved, we cannot determine whether the police, the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales or any other body should change their practices,” concludes Professor McCabe.
The Interior Ministry plans to expand the feasibility study conducted by universities to test and develop the tool to measure forced marriage and female genital mutilation.
It is expected to be completed in March and is intended to help the government understand the scale of the problem and identify the resources needed.
In a statement, Minister for Protection and Violence Against Women and Girls Jess Phillips said: “This government is introducing legislative changes and other measures to tackle this debilitating form of abuse and provide clear direction to frontline workers: they must treat these crimes with the seriousness they deserve.”
“My message to those who commit these crimes is simple: we will bring them to justice.”
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