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May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee Well, yes. There can be harassment from the family, the extended family, or the wider community if girls do challenge their parents and family members, and refuse to conform. There may be physical violence. Often more common is social ostracism, as they are rejected and denounced
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee I think it's a combination of both. I don't think you can separate them, because the debates have been going on for much longer, for a few decades actually. Only in the last decade have you had the government doing something about it. The law has strengthened and created further
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee They're not shared values for many people within or outside of those communities. We would all be equally critical of those values. Communities and cultures are quite quite complex. There are those with conservative cultural value systems and those with progressive cultural value
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee Not in the same way. First of all, there's been no criminal prosecutions of forced marriage cases so far. I think it has happened in some cases around domestic violence, where there may be a court order against someone who doesn't have a status in the country and is being convict
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee I think that would be one of the consequences for anyone who is caught up in or knows about polygamous situations. They may well either be caught up and therefore face deportation themselves, or it may be that they are worried about other members of the family being deported. So
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee The debate has been around both of those issues: criminalization of forced marriage, as well as use of immigration laws to control forced marriage. As I said, both are controversial. There is obviously no prosecution with the criminal law yet. We don't know if it's going to work,
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee I hesitate to use the word “barbaric” because I also think domestic violence is barbaric. I think a lot of practices where people are being abused, and as a cultural basis, often are barbaric practices. It's not just those that exist within minority communities. Of course, I do n
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee I think the Forced Marriage Unit is one of the success stories. It's a government body. It's a joint Home Office and Foreign Office unit, so it is supported by the government. It has a mandate to help British nationals or dual nationals who are taken abroad and threatened with a
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee Do you mean for women's organizations?
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee There is funding for services around domestic and sexual violence in the U.K. I think the problem is that, because of austerity, there have been cuts from local authorities and central government generally to services and to legal aid. The brunt of those cuts to services for min
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee I think awareness raising and information, and working in schools and colleges, raising these issues at a very early age and changing attitudes and behaviour, as well as making victims aware and having professionals give them training to prevent issues escalating before it become
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee Okay, I'll leave it at that. Thank you.
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee Yes, I can.
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui
Citizenship and Immigration committee Yes, we are today.
May 7th, 2015Committee meeting
Hannana Siddiqui