Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lester, on introducing a very important Bill and on his typically humane approach to this issue, which allows for a civil remedy and avoids inflaming by criminal proceedings an already emotionally charged situation. In my very brief remarks I want to concentrate on the impact on young lives—in extreme cases, as we have heard, of people as young as 12 or 13—of being taken out of the UK to another country with which they are very unfamiliar, under the pretext of a normal family visit, only to find that they are expected to marry. Family members other than parents often, sadly, collude in this deception and coercion. What a dreadful betrayal of trust; what intolerable pressure to place on adolescents when they are coming to terms with adulthood and their own identity. We can scarcely be surprised when what follows is so often isolation, depression, domestic violence, self-harm and even death. In the UK we can celebrate, justly, great advances in laws on equality and human rights and institutions designed to uphold and promote these values. I declare an interest as a member of the newly established Commission for Equality and Human Rights. Not only do forced marriages breach the most fundamental human rights, but they are overwhelmingly an assault against the rights of young women. The weight of expectation is entirely on such young women to satisfy what are still seen as traditional concepts of honour in certain communities, although more mundane and even mercenary considerations can also lie behind the parents’ choice of a marriage partner. These inequalities and pressures and the very idea that a family’s honour resides in the conduct of its daughters alone can ultimately result in honour killings. Thankfully, these are rare and not necessarily the outcome of forced marriages. But the two abuses grow from the same beliefs, and it is those beliefs that we have to challenge. We know that they are cultural and not based on any of the great religions. In one such case of which I have a little knowledge, a 16 year-old girl in London was regularly beaten and eventually killed by her father for having ““dishonoured”” the family. The law took its course and he is now serving a life sentence. But the damage did not stop with the girl’s death; there were attempts within the community to cover up the crime and the girl’s elder brother—who, like her, had lived most of his life in the UK—felt absolutely powerless to help her. Both these young people were caught between conflicting and irreconcilable values. In a note indicating that she planned to run away from home, this young woman wrote to her father, "““me and you will probably never understand each other. I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted, but there’s some things you can’t change””." I believe the Bill will signal society’s determination to uphold the basic right of young women like her to choose their own emotional path and show that there is nothing dishonourable in doing so.