Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [HL]

I have a couple of comments on the concerns raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Verma. Given that it is a probing amendment, I can understand some of her comments. My experience of raising certain points on a number of occasions makes me empathise with some of her points. There are always difficulties with legislation in terms of how strong it is and how much impact it will have. Any legislation that comes out of all our work and effort must ensure that criminals are dealt with in the harshest way possible. If we seek to deal with these issues within the framework of family law covering domestic violence and so forth, particularly with regard to children, there should be no ambiguity about the pursuit of justice and ensuring protection for young people and children. In any case there is a danger that this legislation could be perceived as uneven-handed and specifically targeted at certain communities. Although I believe that we have done enough work along the way to alleviate some of those fears, we have not continued to protect vulnerable young people in the way in which they should be protected. If we had dealt with this within the statutory framework of domestic violence law and child protection, we would have made a better job of preventing some of the heartache created by this problem. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, that the weakness in our discussions is that we do not necessarily penetrate to the heart of the communities where deep suspicions remain. The way to tackle that is to make a serious commitment to empowering women and delivering the message again and again that we want to deal with criminals, not criminalise communities. We will tackle those who seek to abuse the rights of individuals. We must be clear about that from the outset so that there are fewer opportunities for misunderstanding.