Asian Window

A helpline for victims has been inundated with callers. Jerome Taylor was given exclusive access to their harrowing stories. From The Independent:

The home Baljit Kaur Howard has made for herself in a quiet Ipswich cul-de-sac is a world away from what she calls her “previous life”. In her sitting room, a mug of tea in hand, she rests her head on her new husband, Phil. “It’s taken me a long time to learn to love Phil,” she says. “Before we met I’d never known what it was like to be loved unconditionally.”

Bal, as she likes to be known, was 17 when her father announced that she was going to be married to a family friend she had met only once before. She then spent eight years trapped in an oppressive, loveless marriage. “I had always expected to have an arranged marriage, but I did not expect a forced marriage,” she says. “I told my father that I didn’t want to marry him. He just said, ‘You’d better get used to the idea. If you run away I will find you’.”

Now aged 39, Bal considers herself lucky. She escaped, but in doing so has been disowned by her family.

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