mother jailed for forcing daughter to marry in Pakistan

A woman found guilty of taking her 17-year-old daughter to Pakistan for a forced marriage was sentenced Wednesday to four-and-a-half years in prison by a British court following a landmark conviction.

The teenage girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was taken to Pakistan by her mother under the guise of a holiday, but later found herself being forced to marry a relative almost twice her age.

The mother, who has three other children, was convicted on Tuesday at Birmingham Crown Court on charges of deceiving the victim into traveling to Pakistan in order to enter into a false marriage, forced marriage and perjury.

The girl's 45-year-old mother, who cannot be named for legal reasons to protect the identity of the victim, tricked her daughter into returning to Pakistan shortly before her 18th birthday.

Culturally embedded'

Prominent Pakistani activist and writer Bina Shah said the problem of forced marriage was culturally embedded in Pakistan, with marriage seen as transactional and girls often considered as commodities.

"It is a major problem in Pakistan. We have the problem of child marriage but also coerced marriages, which, given that most marriages in Pakistan are arranged, is widespread," she said.

The marriages are often made between relations, particularly in rural areas, to keep property in the family, she added.

"People are looking for other advantages, for example, to marry someone with a foreign passport," she told. 

Shah pointed to a case of an Italian girl of Pakistani origin who was rescued from the prospect of a forced marriage last week after she had been lured to the country by her family on false pretenses.

"Violence against women and girls -- including rape, murder through so-called honor killings, acid attacks, domestic violence, and forced marriage -- remained routine," said a Human Rights Watch report on Pakistan published last year.

Repatriation

The Birmingham court heard that the victim had been returned from Pakistan to the UK with the assistance of the Home Office.

The Forced Marriage Unit, a joint team from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Home Office, was set up in the UK in 2005. It provided support to about 1,200 potential cases in 2017, a government spokesman said.

Since being introduced in 2008, more than 1,500 forced-marriage protection orders have also been issued, preventing people from being forced to wed and assisting in repatriating victims.

In the past decade, British diplomats, working in tandem with the unit, have rescued scores of women from forced marriages in Pakistan.

"We dealt with 59 cases in Pakistan last year, 10 male victims and 49 female," a spokesman for the British High Commission in Pakistan told

Last year, British diplomats assisted with 16 repatriations, through rescues or protection orders, he added.

The rescues are sometimes sensitive "snatch" operations, with diplomats secretly making contact with women living in forced marriages and then swooping on their houses to make rapid getaways with the victims in armored cars.