Posted on 08/15/2013 10:41:02 PM PDT by Slings and Arrows
As Britain puts airport staff on alert to spot potential victims of forced marriage, one campaigning group says the trick of putting a spoon in their underwear has saved some youngsters from a forced union in their South Asian ancestral homelands.
The concealed spoon sets off the metal detector at the airport in Britain and the teenagers can be taken away from their parents to be searched -- a last chance to escape a largely hidden practice wrecking the lives of unknown thousands of British youths.
The British school summer holidays, now well under way, mark a peak in reports of young people -- typically girls aged 15 and 16 -- being taken abroad on “holiday,” for a marriage without consent, the government says.
The bleep at airport security may be the last chance they get to escape a marriage to someone they have never met in a country they have never seen.
The spoon trick is the brainchild of the Karma Nirvana charity, which supports victims and survivors of forced marriage and honor-based abuse.
Based in Derby, central England, it fields 6,500 calls per year from around Britain but has almost reached that point so far in 2013 as awareness of the issue grows.
When petrified youngsters ring, “if they don’t know exactly when it may happen or if it’s going to happen, we advise them to put a spoon in their underwear,” said Natasha Rattu, Karma Nirvana’s operations manager.
“When they go though security, it will highlight this object in a private area and, if 16 or over, they will be taken to a safe space where they have that one last opportunity to disclose they're being forced to marry,” she told AFP.
“We’ve had people ring and that it’s helped them and got them out of a dangerous situation. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do with your family around you -- but they won't be aware you have done it. It’s a safe way.”
The charity is working with airports -- so far London Heathrow, Liverpool and Glasgow, with Birmingham to come -- to spot potential signs, such as one-way tickets, the time of year, age of the person and whether they look uncomfortable.
“These are quite general points, but there are things that if you look collectively lead you to believe something more sinister is going on,” said Rattu.
People who come forward can be escorted out of a secure airport exit to help outside.
Marriages without consent, or their refusal, have led to suicides and so-called honour killings, shocking a nation widely deemed to have successfully absorbed immigrant communities and customs.
Officials fear the number of victims coming forward is just the tip of the iceberg, with few community leaders prepared to speak out and risk losing their support base.
One woman, whose identity was protected by Essex Police in southeast England, was forced to get married in India.
She said she was threatened by her father “because he said if I thought about running away he would find me and kill me.”
“I was shipped off with a total stranger.
“That night I was raped by my husband and this abuse continued for about eight and half years of my life.”
She eventually fled.
Last year, the Foreign Office’s Forced Marriage Unit dealt with some 1,500 cases -- 18 percent of them men.
A third of cases involved children aged under 17. The oldest victim was aged 71; the youngest just two.
The cases related to 60 countries: almost half were linked to Pakistan, 11 percent to Bangladesh, eight percent to India, and two percent to Afghanistan. Other countries were Somalia, Turkey and Iraq.
Calls to Karma Nirvana tend to spike before the British school summer holidays and again at the end, said Rattu.
“The holidays are a really good time for young people to go missing because there is nobody accounting for where they are at school,” she said. Since Ramadan ended last week, calls have risen again, including one from an 18-year-old who has fallen pregnant and her family is trying force her into marriage to conceal it.
Burdened by South Asian codes of “izzat,” or family honour, youngsters can be under extreme physical and emotional duress to marry relatives in a culture and country they were not brought up in.
If they refuse, they are often threatened with being thrown out of the family -- or worse. “It really takes a brave person to stand up against their family,” said Rattu.
Well, it WAS an effective measure until someone opened their big fat yap.
I am utterly disgusted. At least Britain is trying to do something, however lame. The rest of Europe is just giving in to the barbarians.
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I hadn’t thought of that. Ouch.
of course I meant the article’s author, not you. The cat was already out of the bag.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCfbYkXtHuA
This lady I discovered on Youtube today by accident, Ann Barnhardt, a stong woman, Catholic, warrior.
That link is all about sex in the Quran, if anyone is brave enough to handle it.
I have seen her videos. She is passionate and well-spoken. And, accurate.
Oh, understood. That’s why the “ouch.”
Yep, and by the way, they are not British, under any circumstances. They are South Asian (or Pakistani if you will) and are Eastern, muslim and in the end, enemies of Western Judeo Christian Civilization. Period. End of Story. May God have Mercy on the West.
Yes, who are we to interfere in their quaint native customs? The Brits should have never let these pagans immigrate to begin with. It is an act of slow-motion cultural suicide, not that the native Fabian Socialists aren’t helping to kill the culture in their own way.
The author of an article that goes on that long and never uses the word “Muslim” has already surrendered in any serious attempt to curb the practices in question.
Not by any means a Muslim-only problem. Other immigrant groups from what used to be British India, including Hindus and Sikhs, are also blighted by this practice, unfortunately.
Divya managed to escape only to get pregnant and no husband
Danged liberal busybodies.
Thanks Slings and Arrows.
Well, it WAS an effective measure until someone opened their big fat yap.
People just LOVE to brag to the worldwide media when they figure our a way to beat the bad guys. Advice for them: STFU!!
Now muzzles have another reason to molest their daughters. What an evil damn religion.
Once again follow the money!!!
Aside from the anti-God (real God) Muslim behavior.... The filthy ratbag father gets a large cash payment from the family in Pakistan that his daughter is sent to to marry into.
The father gets a reverse kind of dowry for doing this. Why??? Because the Muslim boy-husband now gets to live in the UK and he can start bringing family members in. So this marriage payment is really for an immigration visa, many of them actually. This what the young girls father is paid for
Yeah, all cultures are equal, right?
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