Demos’ forced marriage project seeks to identify an effective cross-border approach to preventing forced marriage in Britain.

It draws on Britain’s experience as a funder of outreach and intervention programmes tackling forced and early marriage overseas: In particular we look at the best practice and success stories in Southern Asia, Egypt, the Middle East and Africa. 

Building on Demos’ track record in applying overseas development best-practice to domestic policy (Service International, Recapitalising the Poor, Atlas of Ideas, and other recent publications), the report draws on lessons from DfID evaluations for UK public agencies.  In addition, we incorporate qualitative data on public servant attitudes, opinions and concerns (gathered through partnership with Karma Nirvana and Plan UK) to address what further training and support is required in order to develop an effective response to domestic forced and early marriage. 

The evidence gathered during Demos’ research has been used to draw up a set of implementable policy recommendations designed to strengthen the UK’s cross-border action on early and forced marriage and to outline a strong case for prioritisation of this.  In particular the report focuses on cross-departmental working and on the need for co-ordination between the UK Border Agency, the Department for Schools, local children’s services and policing and on the need for a ‘borderless approach’ to forced marriage – that understands and responds to the fact that forced and early marriage are international issues in terms of their causes, impact and effect. 

As a starting point to our research we work from a set of key principles – drawn from existing work in this area and related areas such as Human Trafficking – in order to provide a framework for policy.  The principles laid out below have served as a guide to our focus and our approach:

• The need for Government to understand forced marriage as a ‘borderless’ issue – with impact and connectivity between countries
• The need for an ‘invest to save’ approach both domestically and internationally – recognising, as Andrew Mitchell has identified, that investment in the prevention of forced marriage can lead to savings in programmes to mitigate its impact
• The need for more thorough meta-evaluation of the programmes and operations of DFID in this area and the policy approaches of peer nations by the UK Government
• The need to work with potential perpetrators as well as potential victims and to educate communities holistically in both the illegality of forced marriage and the potential consequences for individuals, families and communities
• The need to close the legal loopholes which result in perpetrators not facing criminal conviction and that disincentivise potential victims from seeking support

This project is supported by PlanUK