Demand for zero tolerance of honour violence

Jasvinder Sanghera, of support network Karma Nirvana, spoke out following a forum attended by 150 people at Leeds Civic Hall aimed at raising awareness among professionals including health visitors, teachers and social workers.

Miss Sanghera, who narrowly avoided being forced into marriage as a teenager and lost an older sister who set fire to herself following an unhappy marriage, said a hard-hitting campaign featuring celebrities was overdue.

She says she would like it to become as socially unacceptable as drink-driving.

She said: "It's not a question of having a campaign it is a question of when. We need to urgently campaign next year launched with Government funding to challenge attitudes and behaviour in respect of domestic violence. We want to see the zero tolerance attitude which is now applied to that applied to honour-based violence.

"I am more confident now that it will happen – every person in this room agreed that we needed a campaign with a subliminal message. I received a hand-written letter from the Prime Minister David Cameron that he wholeheartedly supports the campaign against forced marriage in this country, that no person should be forced to marry against their will and also that this country is half-asleep in respect of these issues.

"At the moment the perpetrators of this violence are able to hide behind cultural sensitivities and people are tip-toeing around this.

"What we need is a campaign that will send a strong message to them that if they persist they will be locked up. I want to see a lot more prosecutions.

"I went to India recently to film a programme for the BBC to be broadcast next year and people were shocked that such honour-based violence is so widespread in the UK.

"They expected it to occur in India and Pakistan for example but they didn't think it would be tolerated in the UK. They thought better of us and it made me ashamed. We have evidence that children as young as nine are being forced into marriage. That makes me quite ashamed."

Her colleague Natasha Rattu, who attended an inter-ministerial meeting yesterday, representing Miss Sanghera, added: "We did 15 roadshows reaching thousands of people and I think we need to go bigger than we did this year.

"It's an issue where everybody has a responsibility for it and something that everyone should be aware of. It's hugely important that we have the Government's backing on this – the perpetrators need to know that Government has a zero tolerance approach to this type of behaviour."

Det Insp Granville Ward, of West Yorkshire Police, who attended the seminar, said: "We have built our platform – the question is now where do we go from here? There's obviously an issue around general awareness – the victims can be in hard-to-reach groups.

"If we have a campaign it's not a question of having one so much as how we do it. Just having a blanket campaign may be of limited use, I think it will need a lot of thought.

"Our message is twofold. One we want people to report their concerns about other people – a lot of our work is centred around prevention. Second, to reassure victims about the service they will receive.

"We are victim-led – if the victim wants to stay in their home for example we try to facilitate that. And on confidentiality under no circumstances do we reveal a victim's whereabouts without their consent.

"One of the challenges is penetrating this environment – we have to be careful not to be seen as stigmatising a whole community."

Colleague Chief Insp Marianne Huison added: "Approximately 150 incidents of forced marriage or honour-based violence were reported to us last year across West Yorkshire – eight per cent of these were from men. Seven and a half per cent were under 16 and the vast majority of people were in the 19-34 age bracket."

Writer battles to help others

Karma Nirvana is a registered charity that supports victims and survivors of forced marriage and honour-based abuse. The words Karma Nirvana mean peace and enlightenment.

Its chief executive Jasvinder Sanghera is an acclaimed writer who has written movingly about her harrowing experiences most notably in her biography Shame.

After being shown a photograph of a man her parents wanted her to marry she declined and faced vilification. She ended up at one point homeless in Huddersfield. She was recently named Ultimate Woman of the Year by Cosmopolitan magazine.

In 1993 Miss Sanghera established the project to create a support network for women who experienced language and cultural barriers.