Forced marriage: charities warn 'urgent action' needed to stem rising cases
9 min read
Reported cases of forced marriage are on the rise, while government support for victims is falling. Sophie Church explores how the trend can be reversed
Payzee Mahmod, who moved to London aged 11 from Iranian Kurdistan, always saw education as a privilege. After completing her GCSEs in 2003, Payzee was excited to go to college.
But when one of her sisters was taken into care, her father tried to recover family honour by accepting an offer for Payzee’s hand in marriage.
Two months later, an Islamic nikah was held in the family home, followed by a register office marriage. Her husband, who she had never met before, was in his late 20s. Payzee was just 16.
Leaving her family home, she found herself living in a stranger’s house. Another of her sisters, Banaz, who was also forced into marriage, lived in the same property with her own husband.
“It was a very controlled environment,” Payzee tells The House today. “It was discussed between my parents and our husbands that the best thing to do was to live together, so even if one of the husbands wasn’t around, the other one could keep an eye on everyone.”
In late 2005, after a physically violent fight with her husband, Banaz demanded a divorce. When news broke in the community that Banaz had not only walked out on her husband but met someone else, Payzee says the pair were harassed, bombarded with phone calls, and were the victims of repeated attempted kidnappings.
Soon after, Banaz’s boyfriend reported her missing. Using a list of names Banaz had given on her last visit to the police, detectives discovered that the 20-year-old had been murdered. Her father, uncle, cousins, and a man from outside the family were eventually convicted of her murder – an ‘honour killing’ for leaving her marriage. Having heard about the arrests, Payzee’s husband finally agreed to a divorce.
In 2014, forced marriage, including taking someone abroad to marry, was made illegal. Three years later, the government introduced lifelong anonymity for victims of forced marriage, to encourage more reporting of the crime. In 2023, thanks in part to Payzee Mahmod’s campaigning, the minimum age for marriage in the UK was raised from 16 to 18.
Despite these legislative changes, charities say reports of forced marriage are rising – just as the government is cutting funding to support victims, The House can reveal.
According to data supplied in response to a freedom of information request, government funding to NGO partners in the UK and overseas to support forced marriage victims has decreased from £77,500 in 2022/2023 to £63,500 in 2023/2024 and £64,500 in 2024/2025. These include one NGO based in the UK, two in Pakistan, one in Somalia and one based in Somaliland.
This comes as Karma Nirvana, which runs a helpline for honour-based abuse victims, has released figures that show the number of reports of abuse it has received citing forced marriage have risen from 417 in 2022/2023 to 541 in 2023/2024.
At the centre of the government’s forced marriage strategy is the Forced Marriage Unit (FMU), a joint Home Office and Foreign Office body providing support and advice for victims of forced marriage.
According to official statistics, cases in which the FMU gave advice or support to victims of forced marriage decreased each year from 2020. However, the government has admitted figures are “unlikely to be indicative of a decrease in the prevalence of forced marriage in the UK”, for which the FMU’s statistics are “not a good guide”.
“While we recorded a 15 per cent increase in child marriage cases reported to our helpline in the 11 months following the new law [which came into force in 2023], the simultaneous drop in FMU cases [instances in which advice and support are given] raises serious concerns about underreporting and victims not knowing where to turn for help,” says Natasha Rattu, executive director of Karma Nirvana. “This disconnect highlights the urgent need for action.”
Sema Gornall, chief executive officer of The Vavengers, a charity committed to ending violence against women and girls, says Labour’s manifesto pledge to halve violence against women and girls in a decade is an impossible goal as long as the extent of the problem is unknown.
“We’ve talked about halving violence against women and girls in the next decade with the government, but we don’t even know the real numbers,” she says. “They think they will halve the numbers they know of, but actually that won’t happen. I can say that with confidence. I don’t think the government has the know-how.”
In 2022, the Law Commission recommended legal changes to enable all religious marriages to be legally recognised. Under the new system, couples would not have to go through the whole civil ceremony process alongside their religious ones but instead simply give notice to a registration officer of their intention to wed.
These civil preliminaries involve the couple being interviewed by a registration officer, in person and separately from each other, which could “help identify where one of the couple is being coerced into marriage”, according to the Law Commission.
Additionally, if a family member or friend is concerned that someone is being coerced into marriage, they can ask for a caveat to be recorded on the system before a notice of marriage has been given. The Law Commission says this will provide “additional protection against the risks of forced and predatory marriages”.
Crucially, however, this new system only offers couples the choice of having their marriage legally recognised, instead of imposing an obligation. Those wanting to avoid scrutiny in the case of a forced marriage could therefore continue to opt out of the legal route. Under the Marriage Act 1949, only three religious traditions are legally compelled to register their marriage.
“The law itself is out of date,” Khan says. “Christians, Jews and Quakers have to register marriages. The law is already in place requiring registering of marriages, but it’s only for those three religions. The law has not kept up with massive immigration patterns since 1949 – I think that’s what’s gone wrong.”
While Payzee had a registry office marriage as well as a religious one, she believes changing the law to enforce the registration of marriages could better protect victims. “There is no mandatory registration, and that’s the only way to get around capturing every form of forced marriage,” she says. “If we don’t do that, it will just keep being under the radar. So, I think that’s the right next step.”
Aina Khan is a family law specialist whose Register Our Marriage campaign is driving for law reform. “I can tell you now from my work on the ground with Imams, with other faith leaders, and the community – they are saying, ‘If the government changes the law, we would comply overnight’.”
For Labour MP for Bradford West Naz Shah, who was forced into marriage at the age of 15, it is “not about legislation” but rather a “changing of culture”.
“Legislation is very much needed, but we’ve got the legislation in place. For me, it’s about having those conversations of shifting a culture,” she says. “If we’re advocating for people to stop going into forced marriages, that’s an education programme.”
“We need to row back and go back to relationship education and empowering young people, so they have the identity and self-worth to empower them to say, ‘actually, this is not okay’,” the MP adds.
The government has yet to respond to the Law Commission recommendations. However, in December, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said a consultation was being held on “broader reform of marriage law”.
But while government considers bringing in new legal protections campaigners claim it is incorrectly advising on laws already in place.
Karma Nirvana’s Rattu says the government has acknowledged a “lack of understanding” on legislation against child marriage, which is affecting forced marriage victims’ willingness to seek help.
“People have cited to us a lack of confidence in the Forced Marriage Unit on the back of incorrect information being given out,” she says. “We’re quite concerned that people are losing a bit of faith in the government’s Forced Marriage Unit, given that often there’s not a great deal that they can do, for example, to support somebody who’s going through forced marriage.”
She explains that Karma Nirvana was contacted by a police force who was informed by the FMU that the law would not protect children being taken to another country to be married.
“When this police force rang the Forced Marriage Unit, their advice was that because the marriage was taking place in [a different country], our law wouldn’t protect them there, which isn’t actually factually correct,” Rattu says.
“We addressed that with the Home Office, and we addressed it with the FMU, and they acknowledged their lack of understanding about the legislation.”
Gornall agrees that the FMU is failing. “I’m an adviser to the Forced Marriage Unit, and I don’t think it’s fit for purpose,” she says.
Ensuring the government understands existing legal protections for victims is imperative, campaigners say. But increasing the public sector’s understanding of forced marriage may be more difficult.
“As a charity, we are giving ‘here’s the knife, here’s the murder’-type cases to the police,” Gornall says. “How many times I’ve thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this is such a big scandal, surely we will see it anonymised on the front pages’. Even communities say, ‘Yes, we went to the police’. And what happens? Nothing.”
According to a survey of 1,000 victims of gender-based violence, run by The Vavengers in 2023, 90 per cent said they found navigating local authority, policing and reporting systems overly complicated and unsupportive.
“Politicians and even large organisations are very worried about how they speak about these issues,” Gornall adds. “We are not policing communities, and we’re not providing the right resources or support systems for people to be able to speak up.”
With trust in the government’s FMU faltering, funding for charities decreasing, and public authorities apparently unwilling to look the problem directly in the eye, campaigners warn that forced marriage will continue as a practice in the UK.
Shah, however, draws hope from changing community attitudes. “Every society, every generation – what would be acceptable to that generation is not acceptable to the next generation,” the MP says. “Cultures and communities evolve; they move, and they shift. That is true for every community, whatever cultural heritage you come from.”
A government spokesperson said: “Forced marriage is a serious violation of human rights that nobody should ever have to endure, which is why we have the joint Home Office and Foreign Office Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) working to combat forced marriage both at home and abroad. We provide a wide range of support for victims and those at risk.
We recognise this crime is often hidden, which is why we will use every tool at our disposal to help put an end to this practice, to help us achieve our mission of halving violence against women and girls within a decade.”
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