Forced Marriage Law: Aneeta Prem’s Parliamentary Evidence

There is a sentence I have heard many times in safeguarding: But they agreed.

That sentence can hide an enormous amount.

Agreement given because somebody is frightened is not free consent. Agreement given because refusing may mean losing family, home, money or safety is not the same as choosing freely.

That was one of the reasons I supported making forced marriage a specific criminal offence.

I did not believe legislation would solve forced marriage on its own. I still do not. But I believed the law needed to say something unambiguous: nobody has the right to force another person into marriage.

Prevention came first

I founded Freedom Charity in 2009 because young people were facing decisions about marriage that should have been theirs to make. Protecting somebody already at risk mattered. But I wanted to reach children before the pressure began, and to challenge the beliefs that allow it to pass from one generation to the next.

My aim was that the young people we were educating would never become the adults who force somebody else into marriage. That meant talking to girls and boys, not only to those who might be at risk, about consent, control and the right to refuse.

Education alone could not provide a safe place for someone facing immediate danger. Equally, a criminal offence would not tell a child what coercion looked like or give a teacher the confidence to recognise it. Freedom's school work and our campaign for legal protection had to develop together.

What I did

On 8 June 2012, I met Prime Minister David Cameron at the Foreign Office's Forced Marriage Unit alongside other campaigners. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office's photograph and caption record the meeting. The Government announced its decision to criminalise forced marriage that day, following a public consultation. It was a collective campaign involving survivors, charities, frontline professionals and public bodies, not a change that any one person or organisation could claim as their own.

On 20 June 2013, I gave oral evidence to the House of Commons Public Bill Committee examining the legislation. I explained that Freedom had been established with making forced marriage a criminal offence as a primary aim. I also described our work in schools and universities and the training programme we were undertaking with police forces.

I raised the practical problems that worried me: protecting a person's whereabouts, recognising family control, working across agencies and supporting someone who may lose their family network when they seek safety. I also spoke about people with disabilities who could be exploited through marriage. Mental capacity was a concern in Freedom’s work. Somebody who cannot consent to marriage must not be left unprotected simply because nobody used threats or violence.

I supported criminalisation because prevention and protection need clear boundaries. There were concerns that victims might become less willing to report members of their own families. That possibility deserved attention, alongside the danger of treating coercion within a marriage as something different from other serious abuse.

How capacity reached the Lords

The parliamentary record shows how Freedom's concerns were raised as the legislation developed. On 12 November 2013, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon quoted my evidence when responding to the argument that criminalisation would drive forced marriage underground. In that debate, Lord Toby Harris, speaking as Freedom Charity's chair, also pressed the Government to address marriages involving people who lacked capacity to consent.

On 14 January 2014, Toby supported an amendment moved by Baroness Thornton. Their concern was precise: a person who lacks capacity could be caused to marry without violence, threats or other coercion, so a law that required proof of coercion could leave a gap in protection.

The Government reconsidered. On 27 January 2014, Lord Ahmad introduced amendments after concerns raised by Baroness Thornton, Baroness Hamwee and Lord Harris. The resulting section 121(2) of the 2014 Act allows the forced-marriage offence to be committed without proof of violence, threats or coercion where the person lacks capacity to consent, subject to the offence's other legal requirements.

This was a parliamentary and government process involving several people and organisations. The Hansard record establishes Freedom Charity's contribution through our chair. It does not mean that I personally drafted the amendment or that any one campaigner was responsible for the change.

What changed on 16 June 2014

Forced marriage became a criminal offence in England and Wales on 16 June 2014.

The law covered violence, threats and other forms of coercion used to cause somebody to marry without free and full consent. It also protected people who lacked capacity to consent and addressed deception used to take somebody overseas for the purpose of forced marriage.

For me, the importance of the law was never simply the prospect of prosecution. Its wider message mattered too.

A young person should not have to wonder whether family expectation outranks their right to choose. It does not.

Freedom2Choose

When the new offence came into force in June 2014, Freedom Charity used our Freedom2Choose campaign film to explain what the change meant and encourage people to seek help. Theresa May, then Home Secretary, took part alongside police, the Crown Prosecution Service and a forced-marriage survivor. Sky News reported the campaign on 15 June 2014.

The film was part of our public education work. A criminal offence matters only if people know it exists, recognise when they are being coerced and can reach somebody who will respond safely.

What professionals told me

Training police officers, teachers, social workers and other professionals showed me how easily risk could be missed. Some did not recognise forced marriage when it appeared as family pressure rather than physical violence. Others worried about being called racist, feared a hostile response from parents or were uncertain about what to do when a child disclosed something frightening.

These are problems I encountered in my work. They are not a claim that every professional responded in the same way. But uncertainty can have consequences for the person asking for help. The answer is not to avoid the subject. It is to give staff clear safeguarding procedures, specialist support and the confidence to act.

A teacher needs to know how to respond safely if a pupil fears an overseas trip. A health professional must consider whether speaking in front of relatives puts a patient at risk. A police officer needs to recognise that an apparently reassuring family meeting may expose somebody to further danger.

Government forced-marriage guidance warns professionals against initiating family mediation or contacting family members in ways that could alert alleged perpetrators. Nobody should be returned to danger because a professional mistakes a safeguarding concern for a private family disagreement.

Criminalisation cannot do all of this by itself. It needs trained professionals, practical protection and confidential routes to support. It also needs a clear distinction between an arranged marriage freely agreed to by adults and a marriage to which somebody cannot or does not freely consent.

The law became stronger again in 2023

There was another important change on 27 February 2023.

The minimum age of marriage and civil partnership in England and Wales became 18. The forced-marriage offence was also expanded so that it can be an offence to carry out conduct intended to cause a child to enter into a marriage before their eighteenth birthday even where violence, threats or another form of coercion cannot be proved.

This includes ceremonies that are not legally binding.

This matters enormously. For a child, the law no longer asks whether an apparently willing marriage was really arranged or forced in the same way it does for consenting adults. Children should not be placed in that position.

What does forced-marriage law protect today?

For adults, free and full consent remains fundamental.

Where somebody lacks the mental capacity to consent to marriage, coercion does not have to be shown.

For children under 18, causing the child to enter into a marriage can itself engage the forced-marriage offence, whether or not coercion was used.

This is exactly why public discussion has to move beyond the idea that forced marriage always involves somebody being physically dragged towards a wedding. Coercion can be much quieter than that.

What the figures tell us

Official figures show the cases that reach services. They cannot tell us the true prevalence of hidden forced marriage. A rise or fall in referrals may reflect changes in recognition, recording or access to help as well as changes in abuse itself.

Where are the missing children?

In my 2013 evidence to Parliament, I described Freedom's requests for information about young people suspected of going missing because of forced marriage. We had been told that the Department for Education did not keep those particular figures and were directed towards individual education authorities and schools. I asked for the information to be collected centrally.

England now publishes national children-missing-education statistics. The Department for Education estimated that 143,500 children were missing education at some point during the 2024/25 academic year. A separate count found 34,700 children missing education on the autumn 2025 census date. Those are different measures; they must not be added together or presented as children at risk of forced marriage.

These statistics concern children of compulsory school age who are not registered at school and are not receiving suitable education elsewhere. They do not include every pupil who remains registered but is persistently absent, or every older young person who disappears from education after GCSEs. Nor do the published national totals establish how many children were missing because of suspected forced marriage.

That is the question I want safeguarding systems to answer: when a child disappears in circumstances that raise concerns about forced marriage, is the risk recorded, is somebody responsible for following it up, and do we know whether the child is safe? Public figures should be aggregated and protect children's privacy. The purpose is not to identify vulnerable children in a database for public inspection; it is to stop them falling between agencies.

Why education mattered alongside the law

I wrote But It’s Not Fair because laws written for adults do not automatically become understandable to children.

A child may not know the phrase “forced marriage”. They may simply know that they are expected to go abroad, that everyone has decided something for them, or that saying no does not feel possible.

Stories can give children language before they have the confidence to make a disclosure.

The UK Government has hosted But It’s Not Fair as a forced-marriage resource, and Freedom Charity later worked with the PSHE Association on educational resources for schools. That work sits alongside legislation rather than replacing it.

Would I still support criminalisation?

Yes.

But I would never claim that creating an offence finished the job.

A law can establish a boundary. It cannot guarantee that a frightened young person will tell somebody. It cannot guarantee that the first professional they speak to will understand the risk. It cannot ensure that prevention begins early enough.

More than a decade after forced marriage became a crime, the question is no longer simply whether Britain has a law against it.

The question is whether every person at risk can safely exercise the freedom that law was designed to protect: the freedom to choose.

Why I Supported Criminalising Forced Marriage, and What Changed After 2014

Why I campaigned for criminalisation, what changed in 2014 and why prevention still matters.

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