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Expert says forced marriage inflicts ‘significant damage’ and constitutes child abuse.
By Maya Oppenheim, Women’s Correspondent
‘Devastating’ reports of forced marriage to the national helpline have surged as experts warn the issue remains ‘rife’ but it is difficult to see the true scale of the problem due to people not coming forward.
Exclusive data from Karma Nirvana, which supports forced marriage victims, shows its helpline dealt with 42% more cases between April 2022 and March 2023 than they did in the same period two years before – up from 380 cases in 2020–21 to 536 this year.
This means cases are back to pre-pandemic levels when they handled 533 cases between April 2019 and March 2020.
The figures come as a new study found the number of people coming forward to alert authorities to forced marriage plummeted during the pandemic.
First-of-its-kind research, by the University of Lincoln and the University of Bristol, discovered queries to the government’s Forced Marriage Unit s...
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