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Wednesday 28/10/2015
Noreen Riaz states – due to our model of delivery and case work, we are able to draw upon expertise and situations which can highlight specific issues for victims. This allows tailored training for a range of professionals based on sector specific needs.
Today, we are in London providing a programme to Refuge and Women’s Aid
ONE in ten reports of a suspected forced marriage in the UK come from concerned communities in Yorkshire and the Humber, new statistics show.
As a dangerous window of opportunity approaches for women and men to be taken abroad against their will during half term, the Government is today launching a video with the message that the ‘brutal’ practice will not be tolerated in the region.
Around 120 women and men living across Yorkshire and the Humber received help and support from the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) last year in what were potential cases of someone being married against their will.
Pakistan, India and Bangladesh were the most common countries involved in reports to the FMU, however nearly a quarter of cases were from people concerned about a marriage to someone in the UK.
Today the Foreign Office has launched a hard-hitting video showing forced marriage’s devastating impact on the victim and their family, and the criminal consequences of anyone’s involvement in the process.
Forced marriages and child brides may sound far-fetched in Europe. A true story from the Netherlands dispels this notion. Women’s aid organizations expect that Germany will soon be confronted with these issues.
On the photo the Dutch police is using to find her, Fatema wears a chic, leopard-print headscarf. She gazes seriously and defiantly at the camera, just like any other girl at her age. But Fatema is not a normal teenager. The 14-year-old is married and had her first child roughly two months ago.
Ever since August 31, the young Syrian woman and her husband, ten years her senior, have dropped off the authorities’ radar. The couple arrived in the Netherlands via Germany this summer and was housed in the refugee reception center in Ter Apel. Soon thereafter, Fatema did not appear for an appointment at the hospital. Dutch authorities believe that she has already been taken out of the country.
The child bride case in the heart of Europe has caused a stir. Dutch politician Attje Kuiken reacted by tweeting an appeal to put a stop to the practice as she finds it inacceptable. Children must be allowed to be children, she said.
Read Morehttp://www.dw.com/en/when-girls-become-wives-to-escape-war/a-18805240
A duty on all teachers, doctors, nurses and social workers to report child cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) to the police will come into force next week.
New legislation announced earlier this year make such disclosures mandatory and professionals who fail to report the illegal practice in under-18s could face the sack.
Under the new law, health and social-care professionals and teachers in England and Wales will be obliged to report all cases of known FGM in under-18s, whether it is disclosed by the victim or seen by the professional.
Failure to report cases within a month, unless there are “exceptional” safeguarding issues, could result in the professionals facing internal disciplinary action or referral to regulators, which could bar them from practice.
At a conference on Monday, Karen Bradley, minister for preventing abuse and exploitation, announced the legal obligation would begin on 31 October.
A girl in Kenya who was forced to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather when she was only nine years old has been freed after four years of hell.
Younis, 13, who is part of the Samburu tribe, was married off by her parents in accordance to tribal custom, which also includes female genital mutilation and offering girls to male relatives for sex.
She was forced to live with the 78-year-old man for four years until she escaped and walked barefoot to a boarding school for girls called the Samburu Girls Foundation.
Explaining her harrowing and heartbreaking tale, Younis told CNN: ‘When I was about nine years old, my father married me off to an old man who was 78 years old’ ‘He told me that I will be a wife but I was just innocent, I wanted to come to school. But that man wanted me to be a third wife. I told him, I will not be your wife, and he caned me.’
Luckily for Younis and around 200 other girls across Kenya, the Samburu Girls Foundation offered her a way out.
A trans man says he was tricked by his parents into going to India, where they arranged a sham marriage in an effort to “fix” him.
19-year-old Shivy (pictured) is an Indian citizen but has lived in California since three. He’s currently enrolled in the Neurobiology Program at UC Davis.
In June, he and his mother got into an argument after he cut his hair short. As a result, Shivy’s mother confiscated his phone. Going through his text messages, she learned Shivy was transgender and that he had a girlfriend.
“She was furious,” Shivy recalls in a video uploaded to YouTube, “and I didn’t feel safe at all.”
Not long after that, his mother told him his grandmother in India had suddenly become very ill and that he needed to go be with her. Shivy agreed. But halfway through what was supposed to be a two week trip, his family told him he not be returning to the U.S. Instead, he was being forced into an arranged marriage with another man in an effort to change him.
A woman whose family branded her ‘unclean’ after she was gang-raped in her Syrian homeland has been found murdered in Germany – allegedly on the orders of her own mother.
Police believe the victim, named only as Rokstan M, 20, was stabbed to death by her father and brothers in the twisted logic that she had brought disgrace on her family through the sex attack.
Shortly before she was found dead in an allotment garden in the eastern German city of Dessau, she apparently had a premonition of her fate. Writing on her WhatsApp profile, she said: ‘I am awaiting death. But I am too young to die.’
Rokstan had been living in a house for single women before returning to her family a few days before she was murdered and buried in a shallow grave. The killing has served to pull into sharp focus the cultural gulf between Germans and the more than one million refugees expected to arrive in the country this year.
Rokstan had arrived in Germany two years ago following her ordeal.
Virtual College commissioned by the Government to create forced marriage online learning
To support professionals dealing with forced marriage in the course of their work and quickly improve general awareness, the government has commissioned online learning specialist, Virtual College, to produce a new e-learning package.
Approximately 8,000 to 10,000 forced marriages of British citizens take place every year. A forced marriage is where one or both people do not consent to the marriage and pressure or abuse is used.
Forced marriage is now illegal and the first prosecutions have taken place.
Virtual College worked closely with the Forced Marriage Unit (FMU), a joint Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Home Office unit, to create the free online course which raises awareness, challenge perceptions and provides advice on the correct actions to take.
A resource pack is also available to help organisations promote this important course and spread awareness.
