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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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 Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 6:19 pm Post subject: Government's 'heartless' treatment of forced marriage victim |
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Revealed: Government's 'heartless' treatment of forced marriage victims
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British citizens forced into marriages overseas are being asked to cover the costs of their repatriation to the UK. The victims, many of whom have been through violent and traumatic ordeals by the time they reach British officials, are being told to cover the costs of their flights back to the UK, either out of their own pockets or by finding friends who are willing to pay for them.
Under guidelines distributed by the Forced Marriage Unit to civil servants and diplomats abroad, victims who cannot find enough cash are even being asked to take out low-interest loans which will only be given to them if they surrender their passports until the loans are fully repaid.
The unit works around the world but the vast majority of repatriations come out of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Over 90 per cent of them are women.
The emergence of the guidelines comes just days after it was revealed that two of Britain's most prominent charities working with victims of forced marriages have had their Government funding slashed. The Honour Network, which runs the UK's only national helpline for forced marriage victims, and the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation are now reliant on public donations and say they will have to begin cutting vital services unless more money can be found.
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It really frustrates me that the British government doesn't adequately fund services for battered/abused women. In the UK there exists only a fraction of shelters needed for battered women (of all ethnicities) fleeing (often with their kids) from violent relationships. And in the eighties and nineties women's groups campaigned hard for the government and police to start taking forced marriages and honour killings seriously. They eventually made quite an impact, and now these things are considered serious concerns and there is a now special unit to tackle forced marriages (though the first UK conviction for Honour Killing didn't occur until 2003 - as far as I'm aware). Now the government is sneakily cutting back on funding organisations trying to help such women. It's sad to see they may be losing ground.
Perhaps an argument can be made for girls having to reimburse the tax payer, but then, given their horrendous circumstances, at least they could come up with a more humane system. Perhaps they ought to be offered an automatic loan, which they could pay off sometime in the future, when they'd had time to recover and make a new life for themselves. |
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Adventurer
Joined: 28 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 7:43 pm Post subject: |
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It almost seems like the British Government is blaming the victims for being a part of what the Crown deems to be primitive acting cultures that would do such things to their women. Of course, since Britain is not helping the women get back home, it's also treating women in a bad way. I, personally, think that people in America and England and other places should speak more in general about violence, talk about the stories people go through when it comes to domestic violence and people need to work on making the society better instead of just reporting bad crimes to cover headlines.
That's my opinion, anyway. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 7:49 pm Post subject: |
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How many of these cases are there per year? I'm sure the number is small enough that having the tickets tax-payer funded wouldn't be a particular burden to society. By the very nature of what these people have gone through, of course they probably won't have the funds to buy a ticket home.
At the very least, loans which remain interest free for an extended period of time -- perhaps a year or two -- should be availible. But really, I think the social good of simply providing one way coach airfare back to the UK outweighs what I imagine would be a fairly trivial cost. |
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