From The Times
July 24, 2008

Forced to marry her cousin at 17

Richard Ford

Until he arrived for the wedding ceremony, Shazia Qayum had seen her husband-to-be only in a photograph of family gatherings. That was hardly surprising — she set foot in his country for the first time only two weeks earlier, on her first trip abroad.

A family holiday to visit her grandparents in Pakistan ended with Shazia, 17, being forced to marry her 16-year-old cousin. Born and raised in Birmingham as the daughter of two Pakistani immigrants, Shazia was 15 and preparing for her GCSEs when her mother told her she had arranged for her to marry. “My first reaction was to tell them I wanted to be like other girls, continue my education, take my GCSEs and get a job. But my mother said saying ‘no’ to the marriage was not an option,” Shazia, now 28, recalls.

Her parents put her under intense emotional blackmail. “They said it would be a big dishonour on their family, not only in Britain but the extended family overseas, if I did not go ahead. They said it would lower the family’s respect in the community.”

She was taken out of school and kept at home, unable to go out alone. In spite of disappearing suddenly from classes, Shazia said neither her school nor social services tried to find out why. Only once did someone turn up at the house asking about Shazia. She heard her father say that his daughter she was in Pakistan.

After being kept at home for a year, Shazia was allowed to get a job in a factory to which she was taken and collected each day. Talk of the marriage to her cousin ceased and, when she was 17, she was told that the family were going on holiday to Pakistan. “I had never travelled abroad. I was excited as I was going to see my grandparents in Pakistan, the extended family and to see where my parents had come from,” she said.

On the second week of the holiday, marriage preparations began and when she asked who was getting married, Shazia was told: “You are.” “They told me if I did not get married, they would leave me in Pakistan. They had taken my passport,” she said.

Shazia met her future husband on the day of the wedding. They spoke in Urdu as his English was so limited and she told him in their first conversation that her parents had forced her to marry. “He told me he did not care. He just wanted to come to England.”

Shazia is prepared to say in public what others admit only privately: that marriages, both arranged and forced, are used by people who want to get into Britain as a way of getting around tough immigration laws. Her parents told her that she would go back to Britain only if she sponsored her husband’s two-year marriage visa. She wrote to immigration officials saying that she did not want her husband to be given a visa, but her letter was never acknowledged. When he arrived in Britain, the couple spent 13 days together at her parents’ home before she left, the marriage unconsummated. Shazia called police at 3am, who took her out of the house and, effectively, into a life exiled from her family. “I don’t love them any less,” she said. “I will always love them, they are my family.”

Shazia, now running the young person’s team at Karma Nirvana, which supports victims of forced marriage and “honour” violence, said that few non-Asians fully understood the pressures young people came under to abide by their parents’ wishes.

She said that there could sometimes be very little difference between an arranged and a forced marriage. “A lot of emotional blackmail, a lot of pressure can occur before an arranged marriage. It is pressure linked to how the family is perceived and promises made to other families,” Shazia said.