Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Bill

Debate between Pauline Latham and Anthony Mangnall

Friday 19th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Latham]

We are not targeting any community in particular, but there are obviously some areas where people are more likely to have child marriages. There is a point that I will come to later in my speech about international treaties that we have signed up to but not gone through with.

Clearly, we need to stop marriages at 16, but there is a further element to the problem. The laws apply only to registered ceremonies of marriage. Unregistered religious ceremonies in this country are not registered by age at all. In fact, the only requirement on religious marriages is that they are not forced marriages. While the Government’s legislation on forced marriages, inspired by the campaign of my friend and long-time campaigner, Jasvinder Sanghera, is hugely important, it does not work for children. To prove a forced marriage, the courts must find that there is coercion or undue pressure on the child to enter the marriage. In practice, this means that the child needs either to give evidence that will condemn their parents or state that they consented to the child marriage. Very few children of 16 have the strength to go against their parents, because they are totally under their care—I do not want to use the word “control”. Children need to be looked after and brought up by their parents; they cannot act independently at 16.

Karma Nirvana has supported children who do not recognise their child marriage as a forced marriage. They have been conditioned to normalise marriage under the age of 16 and as such, the evidence of coercion or duress is absent. It is frankly unbelievable that, in this country, our legal system allows children, sometimes as young as 7, to consent to unregistered religious child marriages. As long as they are not forced to a standard beyond all reasonable doubt, it is not against the law. My Bill aims to change that. No child should be able to consent to a marriage, whether or not they are under pressure from their parents.

A very small number of children registered their marriage legally in 2019—only 125 legal marriages involving a person under the age of 18 were registered under the parental consent exception. The number of religious child marriages is undocumented in official statistics, however, so it is likely to be higher by a huge factor. Of the cases involving child marriage reported to the Home Office-commissioned national honour- based abuse line in the year to September 2021, only four related to civil marriages. Almost 20 times as many cases involved only a religious ceremony.

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

It is striking that, this week, the Foreign Secretary announced £18 million to tackle child marriage. It is interesting that our foreign policy seems to be ahead of our domestic policy. My hon. Friend is talking about enforcement. How does she think that the enforcement mechanism would work in the Home Office or relevant Department to ensure that we can crack down on child marriage and get the relevant data to help as many people as possible?

[Mrs Latham]

It does seem that certain parts of Government are way ahead. One problem, which I will come on to, is that we are asking other countries to stop child marriage, but they can easily turn around and say, “Why should we, because you do it?”.

As I said, almost 20 times as many cases—more than 95% of all cases—involved only a religious ceremony. It is crucial to understand that, as in Payzee’s case, the religious element is a fundamental part of the marriage in the eyes of the child’s entire community. Just because the law does not recognise unregistered marriage, that does not mean that it does not exist or that it causes any less harm. Having listened to the lived experience of child bride survivors, it is without question that such marriages cause lifelong harms and threaten the futures of all those who are entered into them. That is the problem that my Bill tries to solve.

I will turn to the specifics of how the Bill will try to achieve those aims. It sets a blanket minimum age of marriage in this country of 18, irrespective of whether the marriage is registered. There are two aspects to that. First, it removes the parental consent exception that allows children to marry at 16 or 17 in a civil ceremony with the signature of their parents or a judge. That means that children who wish to marry will have to wait until their 18th birthday.

Fewer than 150 children each year currently use the parental consent exception to get married. A handful of those may be young people marrying without coercion, who will be affected by the Bill, but only to the extent that they will have to wait until they are 18 to carry out their marriage.

Many people marrying under that exception are encouraged, persuaded or conditioned by their parents or families to think that it is a good thing. Such families do not necessarily want to break the law. Karma Nirvana, run by my friend Natasha Rattu, received evidence from some children that their parents would not have arranged their marriages at 16 or 17 except for the fact that it was lawful. Those are the people we are targeting with the change: giving children the protection of the law until they are 18, when they are more able to protest or act independently if they are encouraged to enter a marriage they do not want. Any child by the time they have got to 18 is far more mature to be able to decide their own future than they are at 16, so this change to the law of registration of civil marriages will have an important impact. It will send a very clear message to everyone that marriage under the age of 18 is illegal and not recognised in this country.

Secondly, my Bill will not just remove the parental consent exception, but cover unregistered religious marriages. This is absolutely crucial, and it is complementary to the first ambition. Karma Nirvana’s helpline has worked alongside South Yorkshire police to safeguard two girls who were both married in religious or traditional ceremonies at 15, after they were reported missing by their school when they did not return after the school holidays. Following a police investigation, it was discovered that the two girls had been married in a religious ceremony, and following this had been taken out of school and relocated out of the family home in Sheffield to live in the south-east of England with their in-laws.

Despite the girls only being 15 years old, the police were limited in their ability to safeguard them. There was no offence committed as the marriage was a religious ceremony only and never legally registered. South Yorkshire police did try to pursue forced marriage charges, but it was unable to find any evidence of duress or coercion as both children had consented to the marriages. This highlights a flaw in the forced marriage legislation.

Forced marriage requires evidence of coercion or undue pressure, and in most cases that inevitably means children giving evidence against their parents and families. This hinder prosecutions for forced marriages. My Bill will offer an alternative solution: making arrangements for any marriage, religious or civil, involving a person under the age of 18 will automatically be categorised as a forced marriage, irrespective of any alleged consent, and therefore those who encourage or facilitate child marriage will commit an offence and can face criminal charges.

I will now turn to the penalties and consequences of the Bill. It is worth noting, before I go into more detail, that of course none of the penalties or criminalisation is in any way aimed at the child. We must constantly remember that the child is a victim in these cases and needs our protection, not our judgment or our criticism.

First, changing the law in this way is intended to be a preventive measure in itself. We are sending a very clear message that across England and Wales, irrespective of the type of marriage undertaken, it is against the law for a marriage to include a child. As I have set out, this is powerful in itself and will help to reduce the number of child marriages in families that are not lawbreakers.

A second stage, which already exists under forced marriage legislation, is that where there is a concern for a particular child, the courts can impose a forced marriage protection order. This is an extra safeguarding tool in the powers of the police and social services to prevent child marriages.

Finally, in cases where the deterrent or the preventive action has failed, the Bill will penalise those whose conduct caused a child to enter into a marriage, whether or not the marriage is legally binding and whether or not the marriage has yet taken place. This conduct is punishable by a prison sentence of up to seven years, a fine or both. As such, this scale of penalties is proportionate and aims to safeguard the child at all stages, culminating in criminal sanctions for anyone actually causing a child to enter such a marriage.

One final point about the contents of the Bill is extremely important, and I would like to mention it before moving on to talk about how this Bill satisfies significant policy objectives. This is the extraterritoriality element of the Bill. Very often, child marriages actually take place outside the United Kingdom. A girl from Birmingham was referred to the national honour-based abuse hotline in 2020, after being taken to Pakistan at the age of 18 to get married. She told her teachers about the plans, and they spoke to her parents, who denied them. The child was raped in Pakistan until she became pregnant, and only then was she allowed to return to the United Kingdom. What a tragic and horrifying story. Under normal circumstances, it would be outside the reach of UK law to punish the parents, unless the child was willing to testify against them for having forced her into the marriage, which is highly unlikely and would be asking a huge amount of a child who is in the UK, a victim of child marriage and rape, and unable to act independently. My Bill would ensure that any marriage involving a child who lives in England and Wales, or who is a UK national, is covered, whether or not the actual conduct or marriage takes place in this country. Having talked about the scale of the problem and the contents of my Bill, I will now turn to how it would achieve both its direct aims, and significant policy aims in the future.

[Anthony Mangnall]

It is striking that my hon. Friend is talking about violence against women—next week we have the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women—and the need for us to do more to and to bring perpetrators to justice. We have to shatter the cultural impunity, the idea that people can get away with these crimes. Will she encourage the Minister, and other elements of Government, to go further and ensure that there is a mechanism to document such crimes and lead prosecutions? So often there are no court cases that bring people to justice.

[Mrs Latham]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. We have seen that in the case of FGM, where we have had only one case. That was where a child had to testify against a family member who had conducted the FGM procedure. In this case, however, the child will not have to do that, and it is much better that the child is seen always as the victim, as they should also be in the case of FGM—perhaps that law needs to be tweaked to make it more appropriate. In this case we are not talking about women; we are talking about girls and under-18s. Of course we want violence against any woman or girl to be abolished, and we must do all we can to document that and make sure it never happens.

The Bill’s first objective is to safeguard young people, and in particular to safeguard their futures. This is about breaking a harmful practice legacy that is often handed down from generation to generation. We know that children who are subject to child marriages have significantly poorer opportunities and life chances. Those include a lack of education and job opportunities, the removal of independence, serious physical and mental health problems, developmental difficulties for children born to young mothers, and an increased risk of domestic abuse and divorce. There are many organisations in society with a duty to safeguard children, including social services, the police, and medical professionals. It is telling that when it comes to child marriage, those organisations are turning for support to the voluntary sector, including Karma Nirvana, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, and other charities, rather than being able to rely on the force of the law. The Bill will therefore be an incredibly important tool in safeguarding young people and giving them the best chance for their futures.

I came into politics from a background of education, so giving children the best chance in life has always been at the heart of my political motivations. The Bill will support those young people, and help to ensure that they remain in education or training until they are 18, at which point they are far more able to make informed decisions about their futures.

The second area where the Bill achieves its key policy objectives is in covering both civil and unregistered religious ceremonies. I have been working on this issue for over four years, so I understand that crucial importance of covering religious ceremonies in the legislation. If we were only to regulate civil marriages, we would solve fewer than 5% of the child marriage cases with which the national honour-based abuse helpline deals each year. It is common sense to recognise that the responsibilities and life-changing elements of a marriage flow not from the legal procedure, but rather from the traditional or ceremonial wedding. For so many cases dealt with by the charities I work with, and the forced marriage unit in the Home Office, the religious marriage is the important aspect, and the civil marriage is either non-existent or an afterthought. That is why the Bill will be able to achieve its primary aim of safeguarding young people.

The final point that I would like to make in support of the Bill relates to the UK’s international obligations. The UK is committed to achieving the UN sustainable development goals by 2030. Target 5.3 in the SDGs is to

“eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation”

by 2030. That specifically applies to both religious and non-religious child marriages. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child also recommends that there should be no legal way for anyone to marry under the age of 18, even with parental consent.

By supporting the Bill, we are also helping the UK to set an example to the rest of the world on prioritising children’s futures. It will enable us to further our aims to promote girls’ education around the world, which the Prime Minister has always championed, because, as I have said, dropping out of education is one of the main effects of child marriage.

A practical example is the case of Karma Nirvana ambassador Farhana Raval, who was taken to Bangladesh at 16, under the pretence of visiting a sick relative, in order that she should marry a second cousin. Ironically, and tragically, that marriage was allowed in Bangladesh only because of the UK’s rules. At the time, girls in Bangladesh had to be 18 to be married, but because Farhana was British and the rules were different, the marriage was allowed. Since then, in 2017 Bangladesh implemented a new legal provision allowing younger girls to marry in special circumstances. Human Rights Watch confirmed that Bangladeshi officials repeatedly cited the fact that child marriage is legal in the UK as a justification for that change.

The UK’s position in criticising child marriage around the world and championing children’s future is incompatible with our allowing child marriage at home. To uphold our international obligations under the sustainable development goals and persuade other countries of the importance of banning child marriage, we must first lead by example and ban it ourselves.