Dear Auntie Yasmin

Like most Conservatives I strongly disagree with many of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's opinions, but I have to give her credit for the courage and intellectual honesty involved in tackling some incredibly difficult issues around terrible problems which few other people have the guts to raise.

For example, I respect the work she has done in highlighting problems like Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), forced marriage, and the harm that comes to both young women and young men in forcing them into particular patterns of behaviour.

She gets a lot of letters from people within the Asian community who cannot think of anyone else to turn to, and there was an article about them in today's Sunday Times magazine called "Dear Auntie Yasmin" which made me want to weep.

Here are a couple of extracts ...

"I am Amina. My English is not so good. They want my six year old daughter wear the hijab. Where it says in Qu'ran that a child must do this? When I say no, they beat me, every day. I cannot divorce because I have no job."

Ms Alibhai-Brown thinks that the government estimate of 8,000 women in Britain forced into marriage each year - and that would be shocking enough - is an underestimate:

"More females than ever are being coerced into marriages. Two threats usually get results. Either the mum threatens suicide or the daughter is warned she will be killed. If the victims flee bounty hunters -gangs paid by families - find them, beat them, and throw them back into their families."

In some cases the groom is also a victim of such an arrangement and may have been coerced into the marriage - for example he may be in love with someone else who he does not want to tell his family about, or he may be gay.

Then there are those who are punished for wanting to follow an unapproved career choice:

"Sukhi, 17, always wanted to be a dancer. She joined a dance class in her local area. Her British-Sikh parents were so angry when she told them, they broke one of her legs with a hockey stick.

' You won't believe a mother can do this to her child, but mine did.'

Her leg was broken in so many places, she can never dance again.

Then there is the situation of brides who are beaten because their husband or his family is disappointed at the size of their dowries.

I have always believed that in a free country those women or near-adult girls who genuinely want to wear a veil or other covering should be allowed to do so in those circumstances where they are not doing any harm to anyone else (obviously not when there are security issues or it would interfere with their job). I recall for instance a letter to the papers from a doctor who wears the hijab from her home to the hospital where she works, changes into normal clinical uniform to do her job (wearing no face coverings other than medical masks in the operating theatre as appropriate) and then puts the hijab on to go home. A civilised society should easily be able to cope with that sort of reasonable accommodation. But some of the stories in the "Dear Auntie Yasmin" article highlight the problem that some women may be being forced to wear the veil, which is intolerable.

"A few years back, a fully veiled woman recognised me and followed me home. She threw off her burkha. She was covered in bruises, bite marks, cigarette burns. A chemistry graduate from a northern town, she was beaten up by her father and brother for speaking to a man at a bus stop. 'You see? We are hidden so nobody sees our wounds.'"


And there are those who are forced to have abortions because they are carrying a healthy child of the wrong gender;

"They take us to India, to hospitals where they do tests, kill the child in a day. Clean job. Nobody knows back here, or if they do they don't speak about it. Three times they made me do it and now he has divorced me. I couldn't give him a son."

The article says that there are "crisp, high tech hospitals in India that boast that not a single girl has been delivered there for many years."

Most of the quotes in the article shocked me because of a natural human reaction against such horrors being perpetrated against individuals by their own families, but that shocked me because it was not something happening on an individual scale but evidence of an industrialised horror which flouts Indian law as well as British law and the laws of basic humanity and is likely to have even more dire consequences in India than it will have here.

Abortion is legal in India but sex-selective abortion is not. And for very good reasons: the UN has estimated that India is missing fifty million girls through selective abortion and infanticide as you can read at "The Invisible Girl project."

This will inevitably have catastrophic consequences twenty years down the line for both boys and those girls who don't get aborted or murdered - the former when they grow up and can't find a woman, the latter because they may be treated more like a scarce commodity than human beings and become more likely to fall victim either to organised human traffic or all the kinds of abuses described in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's article as a result.

It is important to make absolutely clear that the vast majority of Asian families in Britain would not dream of acting in any of the ways referred to in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's article, and I am not suggesting for a moment that any race or religion has a monopoly of vice or virtue. There are families of every race and creed where terrible things happen, too and indeed in the horror stories in the article the perpetrators are of both genders and several different races (e.g. the bad guys are not all male, not all muslims, and not all Asians.)

We should be prepared to pass new laws if there is evidence that they are needed but I suspect that enforcing existing laws better would be the best start. Domestic abuse, forced marriage, and FGM are already illegal, in some cases under quite recent laws. The first FGM prosecution recently failed, but at least it was brought, and clearly there need to be more.

The so-called "hospitals" in India which boast that they have not delivered a girl for many years are breaking Indian law. We need to work with the Indian authorities and get these places shut down or at least forced to have a complete change of management and the people running them should be prosecuted.

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