New British law addresses forced marriage

Some embassy officials are heading out to the hills of Kashmir to help a British teenage girl of Pakistani descent. Her parents had forced her to marry her cousin in Pakistan. She is 17 and she says she’s been trapped with her husband in this remote area for eight months. The police pull up to the house and ask to speak to the woman alone. This man helped create the Embassy’s Forced Marriage Response Team. They rush the woman out of the backdoor to their car, and so far there’s been no sign of the husband, who’s also a teenager. Fleeing her husband hasn’t been easy�her parents will see it as a family betrayal, it was her grandmother’s dying wish. Pakistani families in Britain sometimes force their daughters to marry relatives back home to help them get visas. Young woman from traditional Muslim families can face heavy pressure to obey their parents, but this embassy official says more and more women are disobeying their families and paying heavy family prices for it. the woman is then taken to a safe house in Islamabad before coming back to the UK but her father won’t speak to her now. Another girl in the safe house has markings on her wrists and neck. The woman is shocked at how hard it is to stand up to her abusive husband. In the end, this young doesn’t leave. She’s now pregnant and will probably stay with her husband. The British team knows there’s thousands of other women they don’t see who don’t even dare ask for help.