Question
My Lords, the Minister said how horrific the offence of forced marriage is. The same arguments as those advanced today were used for not making domestic violence a crime. We did make it a crime and we put down a benchmark to say that it was intolerable. Is it not time now to make forced marriages a criminal offence and to say very clearly that this will not be tolerated and people will be prosecuted for committing this offence?
Answer
My Lords, the noble Baroness raises a very good point. It is interesting to note that, as a result of domestic violence being made a crime, the number of cases in 1997, 814,000, was almost halved to 407,000 in 2006-07. As I said, the difficulty is that these things happen within families. We have taken a lot of advice and talked to many people. There is a feeling that the crime would go even further underground, because people generally do not want to put their families through it. It is an interesting debate which we will have to consider further as we enter more dialogue on this issue.