Farzana was only 15 when she was forced into a marriage to a cousin she barely knew. Her parents told her they would be travelling to Pakistan to visit her grandfather who was sick, but when she arrived Farzana discovered a marriage was planned for her.
Alone in an unfamiliar country and threatened by her own parents. Farzana had no choice but to go through with the marriage. Once she was married, Farzana was repeatedly raped until she became pregnant. She never went back to school in the UK, and remained trapped in an abusive relationship in Pakistan.
Farzana’s story is all too common. At the government’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU), we receive almost 1,500 phone calls a year relating to a possible or actual forced marriage. Three quarters of the victims in cases where the age was known are young people aged under 25, with the majority of cases (82 per cent) involving a female victim.
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