ninme

The Sunday Telegraph - This is a betrayal of Asian women. By Ross Clark

After a consultation involving 157 individuals and organisations, the Home Office decided last week that there should be no specific offence of rape. Many respondents, according to the Home Office minister Baroness Scotland, fear that a specific offence of rape merely helps to “isolate victims, prevent reconciliation and drive rape further underground”. Instead, she proposed that rapists should be pursued through the civil courts, adding: “We will continue to provide information and assistance both to potential victims and to concerned professionals who are confronted by this abuse.”

Actually, the above is not quite true. I have substituted “rape” for “forced marriage”. In some ways, though, the distinction is academic: a woman forced into marriage is almost certainly, sooner or later, going to be forced into sex as well - not to mention imprisonment and slavery to boot.

Yeah.

Baroness Scotland was certainly in no mood to tolerate forced marriage last September…

What has happened in the meantime to change her mind? The Government’s commitment to human rights has been overridden by its weak-headed devotion to multiculturalism, that’s what. In Labour Party politics there is, of course, an enormous difference between rape and forced marriage: while the former is an offence committed all over the country, the latter is almost exclusively confined to the Asian population. And that, in the Government’s mind, makes a law against forced marriage indefensible - on the grounds that it would discriminate “unfairly” against a particular race.

Indeed, the Home Office appears to have been thinking along these lines when it published its consultation paper on forced marriage, gently suggesting to potential respondents that a criminal offence of forced marriage would “disproportionately impact on black and ethnic communities and might be misinterpreted as an attack on those communities”. In other words: “We would like to catch these brutes who kidnap young members of their families, hustle them off to Pakistan and, under threat of death, marry them off to some thuggish cousin who repulses them. But we are frightened that if we do so we will provoke a few more mad imams to burn the Union flag and demand that unbelievers be put to the sword.”…

The Government has created a situation in which young Asian women are deemed to have lesser human rights than have the rest of us.

Yeah!

The Home Office estimates that 300 British women annually are forced into marriage against their will. It will come as little consolation to them, as “concerned professionals” attempt to effect a “reconciliation” between them and their kidnappers - that their plight has been overlooked supposedly in the name of racial harmony.