The number of girls being forced into marriage spikes during the Christmas holidays due to authorities failing to properly protect girls ahead of the festive period, frontline service providers have warned.
Karma Nirvana, a national charity which supports forced marriage victims, said the wider problem of so-called honour crimes perpetrated against girls also rises during the festive period.
Honour-based abuse includes forced marriage, which sees girls taken abroad to be married off to strangers, coercive control, female genital mutilation (FGM), assault, threats to kill, attempted murder and even murder itself.
Karma Nirvana, which trains the police, NHS and social services about issues of forced marriage, said the most significant increase in cases of forced marriage and wider honour-based abuse reported to them by victims in the autumn and winter period was between last December and this January, when cases increased by 57 per cent.
.... Farhana Raval, a 36-year-old accountant, said she was forced into a marriage on a family holiday to Bangladesh in the summer holidays when she was just 16. [The Independent] Read more
