I mean, lots of people have parents who pressure them to get married, even to marry someone specific, just as people have parents who pressure them to go to certain schools, play certain sports, or enter certain professions. Short of the use of physical force (violence, imprisonment, kidnapping, threats, etc.), what is a forced marriage in the context of adults? Coercion usually implies threats or use of violence or other retribution to compel someone to act--if someone is just facing parental displeasure, have they really been forced to marry, however strong that displeasure is? The article writer said the problem was really common, but all his examples seemed to be people who were not subject to threats or force. They were just under lots of family pressure to get married. Should we send parents to prison for that?

this is a loaded question with a culturally biased definition

Domestic violence, you could argue, was already covered by existing statutes on assault. So is child abuse. If parents are forcing girls into marriage, that's a problem! And it's not the same problem as kidnapping. As for cultural sensitivity -- what about the young people? shouldn't they have rights in the UK? Asian-Brit culture is changing, that's why this problem has surfaced. So the question is, on whose side is Blair: the old ways or the new ways?

Multiculturalism is fine, but when cultural practices violate human rights, they should change. The Blair govt's decision is a sop to the Asian immigrant population. Having invaded iraq and violated the civil liberties of countless Muslim immigrants in the UK, and even killed that Brazilian man on the subway under the impression he was a Muslim terrorist, they make peace by selling out Asian girls.

Yes.

Why do we have to agonize about this? Unfair cultural bias is making girls take their headscarves off in French schools. If believing that free will trumps cultural tradition every time makes me culturally biased, I'm soooo sorry.

you are cock-sure. so certain of your truths. you know just how the world ought to be. if only you could ram that belief down everyone's throat, it would all be fine. you are, in a way, the cause of wars, and even holocausts. you are, in a word, intolerance. the final solution: my way

"He makes some pretty reckless assumptions, going from 'It should come as no surprise that British Asian women are three times as likely to commit suicide than normal' to 'If only 300 cases are reported to the authorities, and most of them from the girls themselves, it becomes fairly obvious they want legal protection after exhausting all other avenues short of suicide.'"

This is not a reckless assumption. The British Journal of Psychiatry reports that the suicide rate of British Asian women 16-24 year old women was three times that of 16-24 year old women of white British origin because of "cultural pressures; conservative parental values and traditions such as arranged marriages may clash with the wishes and expectations of young women themselves." Human rights violations of girls and women everywhere have to stop regardless of the fear of perpetuating stereotypes. CEDAW needs to be ratified in the United States to stop the systematic rape, battering and murder of girls and women. International bodies such as the UN, CEDAW, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Equality Now should eradicate human rights violations.

http://www.mind.org.uk/Information/Factsheets/Suicide/#Suicide_and_race_

Suicide and race

Race and cultural background can be major influences on suicidal behaviour. Patterns of suicide amongst Black and Asian people in the UK are not congruent with patterns of suicide amongst white people. For example, one study of young people of Asian origin in the UK found that the suicide rate of 16-24 year old women was three times that of 16-24 year old women of white British origin. This contrasts sharply with the suicide rates of young Asian men who appear to be far less vulnerable to suicide than young men from white British backgrounds. Asian women's groups have linked the high suicide rates amongst young Asian women to cultural pressures; conservative parental values and traditions such as arranged marriages may clash with the wishes and expectations of young women themselves.

http://www.hrw.org/women/

Abuses against women are relentless, systematic, and widely tolerated, if not explicitly condoned. Violence and discrimination against women are global social epidemics, notwithstanding the very real progress of the international women's human rights movement in identifying, raising awareness about, and challenging impunity for women's human rights violations. We live in a world in which women do not have basic control over what happens to their bodies. Millions of women and girls are forced to marry and have sex with men they do not desire. Women are unable to depend on the government to protect them from physical violence in the home, with sometimes fatal consequences, including increased risk of HIV/AIDS infection. Women in state custody face sexual assault by their jailers. Women are punished for having sex outside of marriage or with a person of their choosing (rather than of their family's choosing). Husbands and other male family members obstruct or dictate women's access to reproductive health care. Doctors and government officials disproportionately target women from disadvantaged or marginalized communities for coercive family planning policies.

This is a rhetorical device: claim victim-hood, in order to persecute.

Do you know who else was a victim? Germans. They were victims of Jews. Always, everywhere, a German was abused, held down, kept back, by the dirty Jew.

So, too, feminists claim they are held back by men. Relentlessly, systematically, widely, and with explicit condonement. Yes, if not for The Man what would Woman be? She would be everything... Mother Earth, and Happiness. Joy, Truth, and World Peace.

And yet... even as she makes these claims, she corrupts the courts. Even as she extolls the virtue of woman, she poisons her arguments with vitriol, bitterness, and attacks ad hominem. And we begin to see this victim outside of her own shadow, and she is not so pure and pretty as she claims to be.

The wage disparity of women is a handy myth, the better to promote sexist policies which fill our institutions with unqualified women at the expense of better qualififed men.

The sex discrimination of women is a clever ruse, the better to tear down university presidents who speak against left-wing anti-semitism.

The abuse of women is a profitable ploy in the hands of an adroit attorney, who need prove no claim to take a man's property in any divorce court.

So the problem with this method is that it has a very clear end. For the victim to rise, the persecutor must fall. For the woman to be free, the Man must be shackled. This is the lesson of history, and we see its beginnings in the fascism that parades through these pages, in which the evil man is omniscient like the evil Jew, in which claims of victimhood are everywhere and unproven, and in the profits of the self-proclaimed victim... every click another copper from a pile of discarded clothes, every column another gold tooth extracted from one who will not need it soon, every triumph a bonfire which consumes truth and casts a flickering light on the face of our real enemy.