

A Birmingham woman was jailed for four and a half years for duping her daughter into travelling to Pakistan and forcing her to marry a man sixteen years her senior. The judge told the mother, ‘You cruelly deceived her. She was frightened, alone, held against her will, being forced into a marriage she dreaded. You must have known her state of mind. Yet for your own purposes, you drove the marriage through.’ It is the first time a victim has given evidence against her family in a trial for this type of offence, and the first conviction for forced marriage in England. The NSPCC hope the sentence will show that young victims can come forward and be supported when they bravely report abuse suffered at the hands of their families. They reported 205 counselling sessions for children concerned about a forced marriage in 2016/2017, and Childline recorded 6,099 visits to its forced marriage online page during the same period.
Crosswinds Prayer Trust was founded in 1994, at Nailsea, near Bristol in the South-west of England by Canon John Simons. Its aim is to mobilise, inform, connect and equip people in Christian Prayer...
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