Ongoing revelations emerging from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (Jay 2014) have dealt another blow to the already tense relationship between the British state and its ethnic minorities, and have taken the Pakistani community to centre stage in public debates. The Inquiry highlighted rape, trafficking, abduction, violence and intimidation of over a thousand children – predominantly white girls – by a number of (mostly) Pakistani heritage men which took place between 1997 and 2013. Over ten years after the 2001 riots and the Report of the Independent Review Team into Community Cohesion (Cantle 2001) accused ethnic minority communities, especially Pakistanis, of living parallel lives and threatening social cohesion, the Rotherham case is set to further undermine ethnic and community relations.

Following this scandal, forced marriages continue to be a national problem associated with British Pakistanis. Unlike arranged marriages, in which the individual is free to agree or disagree with the partner selected by his or her family, forced marriages are premised upon coercion, deception and lack of consent. This is not only an issue for the Pakistani community; both nationally and globally it involves people with links to other south Asian and African countries (Forced Marriage Unit 2014; UNICEF 2014). Yet almost half of all cases of forced marriages in the United Kingdom involve Pakistanis, approximately four times more than Indians and Bangladeshis (Forced Marriage Unit 2014). Given the prominence of this issue within British Pakistani communities, this chapter will restrict its focus to their specific experiences of forced marriages.

Arguably, one should not criticise minority communities without attempting to understand the nuances and complexities of cultural practices and without considering that such practices also fall within broader, not necessarily ethnocultural-specific, issues of gender discrimination, social justice and human rights. At the same time, when focusing on hotly debated ‘cultural practices’, such as forced marriages or female genital mutilation (Nussbaum 1999), which are forced upon non-consensual children and are often illegal, one should know that we are entering a political minefield. Yet this should not deter researchers and practitioners from empirically assessing the issue, as this chapter aims to do. Forced marriages are a cultural practice prevalent within certain communities; regardless of their cultural permissibility, they breach international human rights standards, contravene British law, and often defy Islamic and south Asian laws too.