I took this shot in 1982 of a Nepali bride upon meeting her husband in an arranged marriage.
Posted on 02/18/2008 12:25:41 PM PST by forkinsocket
So the secret is out. What Phil Woolas, a former race relations minister, called the “elephant in the room” in The Sunday Times last week is in full trumpet. Some of us realised a long time ago that the tradition of first-cousin marriages within the Asian community resulted in a worrying number of birth defects, but now we know the full, shocking extent of the problem.
British Pakistanis, for instance, give birth to just 3% of the babies born in Britain, but account for one in three babies born with genetic illnesses. As a nonexecutive director of a local health trust in Derby, I have seen the upward trend of minority babies born with disabilities. And as the founder of a refuge for women escaping from forced marriages I can see that babies with birth defects, although shocking, are part of a wider picture.
These babies would not exist if it were not for the importing of traditional rural customs that should have no place in modern Britain. Every day I come face to face with the pain and distress caused by teenagers being forced into marriages with people they have never met in order to “honour” pledges made when they were babies.
I know how they feel: at 15 I ran away from an arranged marriage to a man I had never met and was disowned by my family and community. Even today my sisters cross the road when they see me.
The “logic” behind first-cousin marriages is keeping the bloodline clean. Blood feuds can be started if such arrangements are not honoured. The number of first cousins within any family will be limited, so children are promised to one another at birth and often undergo engagement ceremonies when very young. One of my male caseworkers, Imran Rehman, was taken out of school aged 10 and took part in a marriage ceremony to a girl of five years old. He enjoyed what he thought was a family party and had no idea of the significance of what was happening.
Imran will be giving evidence with me this week to the home affairs select committee, which is looking into forced marriages. I want it to hear first-hand the experiences and pressures on people who, out of desperation and fear of being married against their will, are driven to leave everything and everyone they ever loved.
Shazia Qayum, another of my caseworkers, has already described how she was taken out of school, held as a prisoner in her home for a year, then taken abroad to marry a man she was forced to sponsor into Britain. And this is also an important point: I believe that much first-cousin marriage is driven by the desire to get relatives into this country. I would be interested to know what proportion of first-cousin marriages take place between cousins who are both British-born. I would suspect few.
Shazia says that during her year out of school she was praying “that someone would knock at the door to see how I was: a teacher, social services, anyone”. But no one came. An GP wrote sick notes to cover her absence from school.
We don’t know how many girls are bundled off to Pakistan, India and Bangladesh each year, but it is in the thousands. Some 300 girls aged 13-16 have disappeared off the school registers in Bedford alone. So many girls, intimidated or subjected to actual violence as they try to resist their parents’ wishes, don’t know there is help available.
When I tried to get the government’s posters – which include a helpline – put up in schools in Derby, head teachers told me they would not do so because “we don’t want to upset the community”.
I have great respect for the action the government is taking – since it set up its forced marriages unit in 2005 it has answered calls from about 5,000 people a year and rescued some 200 a year from being forced into a marriage against their will. Yet if such posters can’t be put up in one of the government’s own schools, we have a problem.
Unless it is tackled properly, we are going to go on hearing horror stories like that of the death of poor 19-year-old Banaz Mahmood, who was raped and tortured by hitmen hired by her uncle after she left an arranged marriage and fell in love with another man. Or that of 17-year-old Shafilea Ahmed, who tried to kill herself by drinking bleach in order to avoid an arranged marriage and was later found dead after a trip to Pakistan, the victim of a suspected “honour killing”.
Before anyone thinks about introducing any aspect of sharia (Islamic law), we should make sure that everyone enjoys the same freedoms under British law. At the very least I’d like to see victims of forced marriages covered by the witness protection scheme and given new identities and National Insurance numbers. At the moment, young people who defy their families spend their lives on the run.
The birth-defect figures tell us that even those who submit to arranged marriages face dangers. Most people who have married first cousins have no idea of the risks. The irony is that the community that pressures them into such marriages shuns them when sickly babies come along. Disability is still taboo in Asian society.
What happens to these children later is even sadder: I’ve seen them married off to get a carer. I know of a girl of 15 who over the telephone underwent a nikah, a Muslim marriage ceremony, to a 42-year-old with the mental capacity of a five-year-old.
All this is controversial within the Asian community. When I spoke on Asian radio recently, half the callers that followed were furious, saying I should mind my own business; but the other half agreed with me.
I should point out that forced marriage is not sanctioned by Islam, Hinduism or Sikhism. It’s tradition, not religion, that is the problem.
These practices predate Islam, etc, but that these practices persist in particular religious settings and die out in others is instructive.
That does make a difference and is simply evidence of the biological self-destruction occuring throughout Europe among the indigenous tribes.
We've seen this before ~ the natives get sick, tired, turn to serious depression, and next thing you know they're just dead.
Marriage to paternal first cousins preserves the tribe. That’s one reason why Islam is still mostly a tribal religion. Also, it’s one reason why there is so much violence among Muslims, whenever they’re not busy killing Infidels.
If their naming customs were the same as ours, it would mean that they would almost always marry first cousins with the same last names as their own.
The warring tribal Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan and parts of Africa are typical examples of this.
This is where “Cool” can be an ally.
Today in US dating your cousin or marrying her is something that is universally mocked at and those guys who engage in that are considered losers.
However, if you ask the guys who married their cousins in Britain or their Native Country, I would bet they wouldn’t consider it something embarrassing or insulting. May even proudly boast about it.
If there is going to be change in behavior, one way is to legislate, which would be hard to do, and other would be to advertise the fact how embarassing and pathetic this really is. Effort should be made to make Cousin-Marriages a pejorative term - something to be laughed at - and then it would have some effect.
Well, it will increase the number of retarded people the terrorists can strap bombs to so it’s all good from their perspective.
Religion of Peace followers also sweep the Darwin Awards.
;^)
So this is a big problem/controversy among the Japanese & Chinese?
I took this shot in 1982 of a Nepali bride upon meeting her husband in an arranged marriage.
Nice Pic. She doesn’t look Nepali.
Are you a Climber?
I want to one day be there for some big peaks bagging.....
Tradition is the first-born child of religion.
U egg me chicken
This article is stupid. I haven’t heard of any Christians stoning their kids lately, and it has nothing to do with tradition.
Religions bring about a certain type of society. I have also often marveled how a very small doctrinal difference manifests itself as a huge societal difference.
Agreed 100%. Ridicule is a sharp knife.
Not a climber. Hiked to 17,000 one day up there. Never anything technical.
Lots of imposing peaks there. Wouldn’t want to be on them, personally. I’ll take my risk elsewhere.
The other defense I’ve read is that by marrying a paternal cousin, her father in law is a paternal uncle - her father’s brother, who she dosn’t have to hide from and is allowed to talk to. Thus the girl is familiar with her new in-laws, who are not strangers to her. It would thus be the only set of future in-laws she could know before an arranged marriage. And given extended clan households, may not even have to move away from her own parents to get married.
Liberals apply family planning, genetic testing, and women’s lib in this kind of environment. I don’t think it can get worse.
Tradition is the first-born child of religion.
Tradition is what enables you to understand English. If you learn a second language, the teacher will instruct you in English. But the first language is learned by tradition. And spelling and grammar rules are tradition, which allows us to understand each other.
You bring in a bunch of ignorant foreigners to do the jobs no one else wants to do.
Why is anyone surprised that they bring their ignorant culture with them?
Sound familiar America?
I figure Britain is 5-10 years ahead of the USA in the madness of massive immigration & multiculturalism. It’s like watching a horror flik of your own future.
You got that right!
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