IT is hardly a secret that young people in the subcontinent, many of them underage, are regularly forced into marriages they might not desire. Indeed, so regressive is the mindset among some circles that the practice is not seen as impinging on an individual’s rights and freedoms. Regrettably, this abusive practice has spread to other countries, too, via the diasporas. In the UK, thousands of cases have been documented where young people, including minors, have been forced into marriage, some on British soil and others brought back to their families’ countries of origin to be coerced into matrimony. Thereafter, many are condemned to a life where they can suffer grave physical, sexual and other forms of abuse, and find it difficult to escape their circumstances. The UK has therefore taken a laudable step in criminalising the practice, with the legislation coming into effect across England and Wales on Monday. Most notably, the law applies not just within Britain but also criminalises a British citizen being forced into marriage abroad. For good reason have campaigners welcomed the laws as a “huge step forward”.

Of course, it is not just people from the subcontinent who mete out such treatment to members of their families. The UK’s Forced Marriage Unit dealt with some 1,300 cases last year alone. Some 18pc of the victims were male, and the cases related to people from 74 different countries. Shockingly, though, nearly two-thirds of the cases related to the UK’s South Asian community. A closer look at these numbers reveals an even more damning indictment: 10pc were linked to Bangladesh, 11pc to India, and a massive 43pc to Pakistan. If the scale of the problem is so large in the UK, we can only guess at what it might be here, where even laws criminalising underage marriage are flouted with impunity. How can this change? For Pakistan, it requires a fundamental shift in society’s patriarchal and tribal mindset. Sadly, there are next to no indications of this happening.

Published in Dawn, June 18th, 2014