Child marriage

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Why are so many imams in the UK willing to force fourteen year old girls to marry against their wishes? Don't ordinary muslims know what's going on?

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2447720/Clerics-18-mosques-caught-agreeing-marry-girls-14-Four-imams-investigated-undercover-operation.html

I am probably the most ignorant and least articulate person on this thread but even I can see that forced marriage isn't anything to do with religion, some people may try to find religious scripture to support their warped ideas but its nothing to do with religion. I think it's more of a cultural/tribal/village thing.

As someone who had an abusive childhood I would never turn a blind eye and I've nearly got my head kicked in a couple of times for not turning a blind eye.

Wannabe, you aren't ignorant or inarticulate at all.

Thank you! I feel a bit out of my depth on this section sometimes but I want to educate and stretch myself

Wannabe - So if it's a cultural/tribal/village thing, would that make someone who speaks out about it racist? If so, how are we ever supposed to end the abuse?

because you keep banging on about MUSLIMS rather than recognising a) it's not simply a Muslim issue and b) ignore the issue that the abuse of children and women is a world wide issue effecting ALL cultures and societies

I don't think it's racist to bring people's attention to what's happening its a practice which needs to be stopped.

I think better training needs to be given to teachers, hcps, and ss to help girls and boys who are at risk needs to be given and we need to make it clear to potential victims that we as a society are against forced marriage they are protected by British law and we will do what we can to help them rebuild their lives.

On the village theme if someone who lived in the next village to you, whom had different values to you committed a crime would you be happily blamed for it.

Indonesian Muslims are completely different to Saudi Arabian Muslims the same as me being RC is completely different to the WBC

I agree with what wannabe says.

Let's put this to bed. This is a manufactured moral panic. Marriages of underage children essentially aren't happening in the UK. Here's why.

It's perfectly possible that you can find an illiterate imam at a benighted, primitivist mosque frequented by old men, who thinks that marrying children is fine and dandy. It's what he did "back home" and as he barely speaks English and knows nothing about British laws, he probably thinks he could still do it. With the slight problem that no-one has asked him to do it. Why not?

Well, what's the market for forced marriage? Why do you think Karma Nirvana are focussed on foreign travel in the school holidays? Why do you think the FMU is located in the Foreign Office, not the Home Office? The answer, of course, is that the main market for forced marriage is people wanting to bring family and clan into the country. By marrying daughters (usually) off to a Pakistani citizen, they obtain (at some point) right of abode in the UK. That marriage has to be legal in the country in which it's contracted.

So a sketchy imam providing a sketchy religious marriage in a sketchy mosque in Rochdale is of no value: it doesn't provide any form of right of abode. So the only people who might end up being "married" in such ceremony would be some bizarre hypothetical case in which two families in the UK conspired to "marry" (but not actually marry) their children for some nefarious purpose. If there's some underground culture of British citizens marrying their British citizen children off in shady illegal ceremonies for the purposes of, well, I don't know, "legitimising" (in their own eyes, at least) underage sex, then let's have it out on the table and see some evidence. Because I call shenanigans on that: I don't believe it's happening.

The problem of forced marriage in the UK is mostly associated with immigration, and therefore requires a legitimate (for some value of legitimate) marriage certificate. A religious marriage in the UK would, on many levels, not help that purpose. Hence it isn't happening. There are some ignorant, ill-educated imams to whom the news hasn't yet penetrated, who think that were such an event to occur, they'd be up for it. But it isn't, so they are only guilty of being ignorant, which we knew already.

If it's claimed that underage marriages are actually being performed, let's see the evidence.

Let's watch the telly - Exposure: Forced To Marry - ITV Wednesday at 10:35.

I agree that forced marriage to aid immigration into the UK is a big problem.

Let's keep banging on about our "concern" about all those forced underaged marriages. This thread is a sham and all the intelligent poster's here know it.

The other way it can be used is as a method of controlling girls and young women by men.
'She's gone to xxx to learn how to be a good girl' was a phrase I heard several times about an older sister. She sometimes came back married.
Many parents were worried, terrified by the growing divisions between them and their westernised children as they grew up, and the difference in expectations of relationships and roles. So getting your girl married was a way of 'letting her know her place'
Still wrong, but many evils are done in the name of love in all cultures.

silver do you think this will eventually change in the next generation or will the married young girl be co-erced by her spouse to do exactly the same 20 years later with her own dd

I've seen it change in many many families, the children of 10 that I taught in 1990 are now 33, bilingual and aware of the legal rights and opportunities that they are entitled to.
Their children are unlikely to end up in forced marriages, the trend is for arranged marriages with someone much closer to your own age and education level, for them to happen in your twenties and for both sides to have the right of vetoing a potential partner.
There are also a large number of individuals choosing their own partners, but still with parental approval seen as hugely important.
The other development has been first generation parents becoming aware of the fact that girls, if educated, can become respectable professionals and earn a decent salary. Which some was inconceivable.
It just takes a while if fundamental changes are going to be truly effective rather than surface compliance or legally enforced and then flouted.
You need the laws and the proactive intervention whilst the communities slowly, slowly adapt to a new way of thinking.

do you think this will eventually change in the next generation or will the married young girl be co-erced by her spouse to do exactly the same 20 years later with her own dd

All we have is anecdote.

Firstly, a lot of the forced marriages won't achieve their long-term intent. Educated, English-speaking girls have been coerced into marriages to semi-literate village cousins from Pakistan. You don't have to read MN very long to see threads about such marriages, and it's quite obvious that much less power is wielded by their husbands than was by their fathers. It isn't impossible to force a 40 year old English-speaking woman educated in the UK, living in the UK, to stay in a loveless marriage and then condemn her daughters to the same. But it's a hell of a lot harder than in the previous generation when the mothers often spoke little or no English and didn't really want to be in the UK anyway.

The converse situation, where girls from Pakistan are coerced into marriages with boys in the UK, may be harder to deal with: there is a problem in primary schools of mothers who don't speak English because they were imported at sixteen and then isolated within the community, but there are initiatives to deal with that.

But the changes to immigration legislation that crescentmoon points to are going to solve the problem pretty effectively, even though they are a sledgehammer to crack a medium-sized nut and there's going to be a lot of collateral damage. In order to obtain right of residence for your non-EU spouse, you will need to be 21 and able to show a taxable, legal, non-benefit, income of £20000. That will mean that any woman subject to family pressure to enter into a forced marriage will be 21 and have an income of £20000 per year (and therefore be educated). Parents have far less control over people in that situation.

It won't necessarily solve the problem of young women being brought to this country to marry British Pakistani men (although, again anecdotally, there's a strong suggestion that young Pakistani men don't want to marry illiterate village girls anyway) but it will certainly address the problem of British Pakistani women being married off to men from "back home" (on the assumption that none of the women want this).

There's a good PhD for someone to go out into the Pakistani/Bangladeshi community in the midlands and northern England (the reason for Mumsnet regulars who are Muslim not seeing this issue is probably because MN's demographic skews London-wards) and do some fieldwork on attitudes to marriage amongst people currently in their forties (ie, with children of marrying age) and in their late teens and twenties (ie, of legal/likely marrying age). My gut feel is that we're seeing the last convulsions of this problem and it will be gone in fifteen to twenty years, but evidence is desperately needed.

The other development has been first generation parents becoming aware of the fact that girls, if educated, can become respectable professionals and earn a decent salary. Which some was inconceivable

Isn't there some evidence that in fact there's been an inversion of roles, and that Pakistani-heritage women are doing very well in school, university and the workplace, even those from quite "traditional" backgrounds, while men from a similar background are less likely follow these paths? I think the reasons adduced are about machismo, education being seen as "women's work" and so on, but it all seems a bit stereotype-mongering. More research needed.

I know that all I have is anecdotal, first-hand experience and that more research and data collection is essential.Preferably by members of the community that is being studied.
I was remembering the confusion of a Bengali father in his 60s, trying to get his head around the fact that his daughter, with a good education, could be a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant and that these high-status jobs were not unobtainable because of her sex.
He wasn't the only one I talked with who had not thought of his daughter being able to achieve anything other than a good marriage and many children. Preferably male.

I think it is optimistic to think that the longer a person is in the UK, the more they will adopt the UK's laws and moral attitudes. The opposite often seems to be happening eg younger women wearing veils when their grans and mums never did, and young men trying to create sharia law zones.

People naturally want to insulate their families from the evil they perceive in society. The problem is that some people see the host culture as mostly evil.

I used to work with a Man who was forced to marry a girl from back home, this was about 17 years ago, he'd been taken to Bangladesh on pretext of a holiday. He married the girl and came home (UK), then refused point blank to have anything to do with her, no telephone calls or anything.
Poor man and poor girl back home. I often think about him and wonder how it all panned out.

Forced marriages I agree do happen, not exclusively in Muslim households, I'm all for the more stringent visa requirements currently in place.

I do think it is petering out as second and third generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are growing up having their own children the links with 'back home' are becoming weaker. Many don't even speak their mother tongue.

I certainly would not expect my children to marry anyone from' back home', I wouldn't even do the arranged marriage thing, it's not my life I'm not the one who will have to live with this person and have children with them. I imagine I'd help with introductions etc. if my girls want that (as adults after finishing their education and having a fulfilling career I hope), altho to be honest I'd have no idea where to begin.

Funnily enough I know several young men who were coerced into marriage as well. The belief on the part of their parents and community was the responsibility would calm them down.

You don't see TV programmes about that though.

Funnily enough I know several young men who were coerced into marriage as well.

Much, much easier for them to extricate themselves from, though. I'd say that the woman was in large part the victim there as well. Either they end up not speaking English in England married to a man they don't love (bad) or they end up with a husband who barely speaks English whom they don't love (bad). In both cases, family pressure will make separation, even if both parties want it, very challenging. Just as "why didn't she just leave him?" is an unhelpful response on DV, so it is here.

To see the human cost of this sort of thing (arranged, forced, the difference is less clear cut that people want to imply):

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/relationships/a1602769-End-my-18-year-arranged-marriage

would you happy for your dd to marry a non moslem or co habit or would that be unacceptable?

would you happy for your dd to marry a non moslem or co habit or would that be unacceptable?

What's that got to do with anything?