Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [Lords]

I have been delighted to listen to many of the speeches that have been made in this debate. Clearly, there is enormous cross-party support for the Bill. I join others in congratulating the hon. Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) on highlighting this important issue and bringing it to the attention not only of Members of this House but to the wider community. I will be fairly brief, but I wish to make several points to the hon. and learned Solicitor-General, whose opinion I always appreciate. First, I want to try to understand, from her point of view, the spectrum that has been highlighted during the debate between forced marriage, arranged marriage, matchmaking and the general psychological pressure that is sometimes put on young women to get married. As the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) said, forced marriage often goes hand in hand with violence against women in a symbiotic relationship. Another problem with forced marriages is that of women becoming a form of quasi-forced labour. A lot of the young women who come from abroad have no social or family network. They are brought into this country as a form of slave labour for the household—sometimes, unfortunately, for the mother-in-law, who views her as an adjunct to the family merely as unpaid labour. The hon. Member for Solihull said that sometimes those young girls become, in effect, sexual slaves. That is a big problem, because they have nobody to protect them. I hope that the Bill will go some way towards dealing with the three abuses—violence, slave labour and sexual slavery—that these girls have to deal with when they are brought into this country through forced marriages. I still find it difficult to distinguish between forced marriage, arranged marriage, and psychological pressure. How does one define a forced marriage? As we heard earlier, many women come under enormous psychological pressure to go into a marriage. Is that a forced marriage? If not, why not? Perhaps the Minister can clarify those points. Secondly, strong community relations are key to this. While there are many benefits to multiculturalism, perhaps one of the unintended consequences has been the prevalence of forced marriage in this country. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) observed that there are 5,000 such cases; there would have been far fewer 10 years ago. Strong community relations play a key role, and communication is critical. It is important that the infrastructure is in place and that there is a facility to help women caught up in forced marriages to find an easy way out of the trap in which they find themselves. That does not mean we must have a society into which people from different ethnic backgrounds feel they have to assimilate; we need an integrated society in which we respect others’ cultures and backgrounds without making them assimilate. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley made an important point about language. As people come into this country, it is important that there is far more encouragement for them to adopt its mother tongue, which is English, so that they can integrate, if not assimilate. Learning English is important because if they have a problem with their marriage, they should be able to communicate, in English, any problem to the facility that the Bill seeks to introduce.