A court in Pakistan ruled on Tuesday that 14-year-old Christian girl Maira Shahbaz voluntarily converted to Islam and is legally married to an older Muslim man named Mohamad Nakash, even though Maira and her family say Nakash kidnapped her at gunpoint with two accomplices during the coronavirus lockdown in April.
The number of girls sold into forced marriages and the rate of so-called “honour crimes” spikes during Christmas, says a UK based charity.
Police across the UK began the first ever national crackdown on forced marriage at a number of airports on Monday as latest figures show a spike in children being trafficked abroad to marry family members or acquaintances.
MPs are debating whether to raise the legal age of marriage in the United Kingdom in order to try and tackle the problem of forced marriages. The current legal age of marriage is 18 but 16- and 17-year-olds can get married with their parents’ permission.
Primary school children from the age of five will be taught about gender reassignment, LGBT “families”, and other controversial topics, with parents denied an opt-out, according to reports.
At least 1,000 girls and women in the UK have been subjected to the African practice of “breast ironing” — deforming the breast with a hot rock in a belief it will make a girl less vulnerable to sexual advances from men.
Details of what may be Britain’s worst ever grooming gang case are emerging after being taken up by a member of the House of Lords, with the victim allegedly abducted, held captive for 12 years, and forced into two Islamic marriages and eight abortions.
According to the National Suppression of Honor Prevention of Childhood and Forced Marriage, a hotline set up for victims, the number of calls from those wanting to get out of forced or child marriages has steadily increased in Sweden.
Government ministers are considering raising the minimum age for marriage in England and Wales from 16, as the phenomenon of children from minority communities being taken abroad for forced weddings intensifies.
There has been a 100 percent year-on-year rise in the number of forced marriage cases linked to Somali heritage youngsters, with many tricked into returning to Africa, where they are often detained and abused, officials say.
A British police officer called a charity to ask if it were acceptable for an Iraqi man to date a 12-year-old girl because he wanted to be “culturally sensitive” when dealing with a suspected paedophile.
UK police pushed charges after less than one in 38 forced marriage reports, with just three convictions in the four years since it was made illegal in the UK.
The Home Office is allowing women with severe mental disabilities to be forcibly married and raped, in Britain and Pakistan, so that foreign men can obtain a visa and stay in the country.
Immigration lawyer and former local Labour councillor Asama Javed advised an undercover journalist there is “nothing wrong” with a father forcing a 15-year-old daughter into marriage, according to reports.
Government officials are handing visas to the husbands of girls who have been forcibly married, raped, and impregnated abroad, allowing them to settle in Britain permanently.
A couple who threatened to murder and “chop up” their daughter after tricking her into travelling to Bangladesh for a forced marriage with her cousin has been jailed for eight years.
British police forces are warning children that they may be subject to “honour based violence” such as forced marriages and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) when they go on vacation as the prevalence of the crimes spikes amongst the country’s minority communities during the school summer break.
LONDON (AP) — A British jury has convicted a couple of attempting to force their teenage daughter to marry her first cousin in Bangladesh.
A woman who forced her teenage daughter to marry a male relative who had raped and impregnated her as a child has been jailed for four and a half years in the UK’s first successful prosecution of its kind.
Girls in Sweden are being advised that if they fear being taken overseas to be subjected to a forced marriage or Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) to hide a spoon in their underwear.
A teenager “wept” during a forced marriage ceremony in Pakistan to the man who had impregnated her years before as a 13-year-old child, Birmingham Crown Court heard.
A British teenage girl tricked into a forced marriage in Bangladesh was seen “running and screaming” from her family during her rescue, Leeds Crown Court has heard.
Nearly 1,200 forced marriage cases were logged by the government’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) last year, new data shows, with the body saying the number “may not reflect the full scale of the abuse.”
A woman who suffered severe head injury from a past violent rape was ‘married off’ by her father for money in a deal to improve the husband’s UK immigration prospects, a judge has ruled.
TEL AVIV — A 14-year-old Palestinian girl from Hebron, Fatma Sema, fled her home to Israel a few weeks ago, allegedly to escape a forced marriage in which she was living under slave-like conditions, according to a report in the Jerusalem-based Palestinian publication Al Quds.
Just one in 30 cases of alleged forced marriages are leading to a prosecution, sparking claims current laws are failing and conviction rates are too low.
The number of children subjected to or fearing forced marriage being offered assistance by the UK’s leading children’s charity has hit a record level, new data has revealed.
Ibrahim Omerdic has been convicted for marrying a child bride to a much older man under laws prohibiting forced marriage in Melbourne, Australia.
So-called “honour crimes” have risen by 40 per cent in five years in London, with the number of forced marriage doubling in the same period.
Britain’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) recorded over 1,400 victims in 2016, up from 1,200 the previous year.
