UK – Forced Marriages & Sex Trafficking – New Study
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: June 12, 2006
Rights
Child
Text – 113. Child marriage
Consent to marriage
Morgan
Published: 13/06/2006 – 17:07:58
PM
Sex trafficking
A new study will try to put together research from ‘the world’s most silent
and abused women.’
The study will investigate the role of society and culture as a complicit to
the process of sex trafficking.
The study by Mega Arumugam, a doctoral student at the University of
Leicester, will be launched today at a public Festival of Postgraduate
Research.
“Using a combination of in-depth interviews, the study will investigate the
prevalence of ‘bride trade’ and its link to forced marriage in the UK.”
According to researcher Mega Arumugam: “By-products such as forced marriage
and bride-trade culminate out of certain practices embedded in family and
kinship relations within some of Britain’s ethnic communities. These practices
not only condone exploitation and sexualized violence against women, but can
actually encourage sexual trafficking of young girls and women”.
Mega added that the study aims to move beyond the focus on trafficking for
the commercial sex trade to include other contexts in which women are exploited
as items for exchange or are denied individual autonomy or authority.
Her study will highlight the striking parallel between traditional violence
stemming out of culturally-condoned exploitation of women and that of sex
trafficking, the modern day slavery.
“Marriage can be an attractive tool for sex traffickers. The legality of
marriage often offers a false sense of security that there is no victimisation,
coercion or exploitation involved, hence providing a veil for the perpetrators,
and could possibly lead to a means of trafficking women across the UK,”
according to the study’s author.
“When the process of trafficking begin at a more domestic level – with
perpetrators ranging from spouses and partners to parents and other family
members, the familial relationship between trafficking agents and victims often
leads to barriers in disclosure. This provides the perpetrators with a
coercive tool to use and abuse these women at every step of the trafficking
game”.
“The study will help inform policy makers and communities at large of a
criminal network that could link crime to the murky side of social and cultural
practices and hence defy the myth that crimes such as sex-trafficking are
predominantly organised ‘Mafia business'”.
“It will also provide a whole new perception to gender specific violence at
its most corrosive forms without undermining the foundations of a community’s
sense of self-identity and its cultural tradition.”
Speaking about
what inspired her research, Mega Arumugam said: “I have always had the
opportunity of experiencing the many privileges that life has to offer and now
it is my turn, through my research, to provide that hope of emancipation to the
women out there who are being abused because of their gendered position within
their society. The research will hopefully give ‘voice’ to many of these
silent groups of women.”
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