Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Bill

Virendra Sharma Excerpts

Friday 19th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Latham]

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for making that very fair point. These children have been coerced into marriage, as they are too young to make the decision themselves. The whole point of the Bill is to stop them having their parents make the decision on their behalf. The children are not old enough.

Let us consider the case of the inspirational child marriage survivor, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation campaigner Payzee Mahmod, who I have been fortunate enough to work with throughout this whole campaign. Payzee was just 16 when she was coerced into marrying a man of 32—literally twice her age—who she did not know. That was in this country, not abroad. Payzee did not want to be married. She wanted to continue her education and go to university. As soon as the religious ceremony took place, Payzee was married in the eyes of her community, and expected to leave education and become a wife and mother.

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way; she is always very generous with her time. She is making strong points this morning, and I congratulate her on her hard work to bring this Bill before us.

My own mother married at 16. She was a kind and clever woman, but without formal education. Her gift to her daughters—my sisters—was to offer them access to education and not to marry them off young, but instead to encourage school and university before settling down. Marriage under 18 is child marriage and not something we would condone in any other situation. Does the hon. Lady agree that the experience of child marriage for millions is one of entrenching poverty and low education levels for women and girls?

[Mrs Latham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point, because young people who are married are often taken out not only of education, but of society, and hidden away. They do not take a full part in society. This Bill will give those young people—it is boys as well as girls—the opportunity to take full part in society from the age of 18, because it will be their choice.

Payzee’s sister, Banaz, was also the victim of child marriage. Earlier in the same year that Payzee was married, Banaz was married to an abusive husband. When she tried to leave him, her family told her she would be shaming them. She did leave, but then was murdered by men from her own family and community. This tragic case illustrates one of the dangers of child marriages and the responsibility we have in this House to intervene. There is a really good docudrama called “Honour”. If anyone doubts any of what we are saying today, they should watch that, because it is about Banaz and her story.

Banning child marriage is about safeguarding girls’ and young boys’ futures. It includes protecting boys and girls like Banaz from abusive and unwanted relationships, but it is also about ensuring that children like Payzee, who desire an education, are given the best chance in life.

Our current laws stem back to 1929, when the Age of Marriage Act banned marriages between under-16s. Twenty years later, the Marriage Act 1949 permitted children over the age of 16 to marry with parental consent, and the law has not been changed since. In 1949, society was very different. School leaving age under the Education Act 1944 was just 15, and the average age of marriage for women was under 23. In those days, the Queen was not even on the throne, contraception like the pill was not available and being gay was still illegal. Life has changed dramatically in the years since 1949. In fact, in those days, people could not even buy tights, because they had not been invented—they had to have stockings. Life is completely different now.

Contrast that with 2021, where being in educational training is compulsory until the age of 18 in England, and the average age of marriage is over 30. The provision for marriage at 16 is therefore entirely outdated and prevents children from completing their compulsory educational training before entering into a commitment as huge as marriage.

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[Mrs Latham]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. As I mentioned to him earlier, I have been married a very, very long time, so obviously I agree. [Interruption.] Fifty-three years, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Virendra Sharma]

I just want to say that the hon. Lady is not the only one who has been married for so long. I have been married for longer than her, though only by a few months.

[Mrs Latham]

So obviously, the institution of marriage is a good thing. I do not ever want to stop people getting married. It is outdated to talk about people having children out of wedlock being a sin. If a girl becomes pregnant on her 16th birthday, she will not have the baby until she is almost 17—16 years and nine months—and she has to wait for only another year and three months until she can get married. In that time, she and the person that she has become pregnant by—whether that is by design or not—will, between them, be able to judge whether that is the right choice for them. Clearly, children being brought up in a loving household is obviously the best thing for everybody. Eighteen is the age at which marriage should happen, not before.

I have been long aware of and engaged in this issue through my association for more than a decade with Jasvinder Sanghera, who grew up in Derby and originally founded Karma Nirvana there. As I said, it is now run by Natasha Rattu in Leeds. I have been campaigning on this issue in Parliament for several years and proposed a private Member’s Bill in the 2019 Parliament, which fell at Dissolution twice. I am therefore delighted to be able to introduce this Bill today, and I hope that it will pass this stage of the parliamentary process and proceed towards changing the lives of young boys and girls who would otherwise have been subject to child marriage, whether in the UK or around the world.

I must acknowledge the help and support that I have had in bringing the Bill forward. The charities that form the partnership Girls Not Brides UK, which include Karma Nirvana, IKWRO—the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation—FORWARD—the Foundation of Women’s Health Research and Development—and the Independent Yemen Group, have been instrumental in providing me with data, campaign support and a never-ending source of inspiration to keep on pushing for change in this area.

Thanks must also go to those Members who supported me throughout the process, from the Bill’s birth as a ten-minute rule Bill to finally reaching Second Reading today. Like many of the best achievements in this House, it is a truly cross-party effort, and I pay tribute to the hard work and support of colleagues, including the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), my hon. Friends the Members for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray) and for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), my hon. Friends the Members for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady), for Crawley (Henry Smith) and for Shipley (Philip Davies), my right hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani) and, not least, my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). In particular, thanks must also go to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), who was drawn out of the private Members’ Bill ballot and kindly gave his support to the Bill, allowing me to take it forward in his place when he was appointed Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

I also place on record my thanks to the Minister for the help and support that he has shown in getting the Bill to this stage. I look forward to working with him if the Bill passes Second Reading today. I have also had productive discussions with and support from the Minister responsible for safeguarding—the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean)—and her predecessor in that role, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins). I thank them both and the officials in their Departments for their hard work on getting this important piece of legislation right.

In conclusion, I urge all right hon. and hon. Members to support my Bill, for three connected reasons. First, it will safeguard young people by establishing 18 as the legal age of marriage in this country with no exceptions, giving a clear message to everyone that child marriage is unacceptable. Secondly, the Bill criminalises anyone who causes a child to enter a marriage, whether or not it is in a legally binding ceremony. The data tells us that many of the cases of child marriage involve only a religious ceremony, so this is an absolutely crucial aspect of the Bill.

Finally, the Bill will help the UK to live up to its international obligations by banning child marriage in all its forms, and allow us to take that message to the rest of the world. We support the UN’s call to end child marriage, but we can do that only if we ban it in this country. Let us finally give our children time to mature and see what life can offer after their 18th birthday. There is so much on offer for everyone to enjoy. [Interruption.]

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[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I cannot tell you, Mr Speaker, how much I welcome this Bill and how grateful I am to my good friend the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) for all her work campaigning on such an important topic over years. I wish to make it clear that this is not about race, religion or even the institution of marriage; it is about child protection. I also thank the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), for all his work on not only this issue but child protection across the board.

I thank the organisations Karma Nirvana and IKWRO and the campaigning group Girls Not Brides; they have been campaigning on this issue and helping us all for many years.

I should clarify one point: the vast majority of child marriages involve girls, but occasionally they involve boys, and that is often when the family believe that the boy might be gay.

Let me talk a little about the scale of this issue. Last year, around a quarter of the 753 cases dealt with by the UK’s forced marriage unit involved children under the age of 18. Between 2007 and 2017, some 3,096 marriages involving children aged 16 and 17 were legally registered in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics. Under the new law in the Bill, it will be absolutely clear to everyone that no child should face child marriage—whether the marriage is registered or not—and the harms it causes.

As the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire said, registered child marriages at 16 and 17 are only part of the picture. The ONS statistics do not capture non-registered and religious marriages in the UK. In the past year, Karma Nirvana has supported 76 cases involving child marriages, and only 5% of them were registered. The overwhelming 95%—72 out of 76 marriages—were non-registered and religious marriages, which is why the Bill is so important: it covers registered and non-registered marriages. The fact that some marriages are non-registered makes safeguarding even harder and, therefore, child protection more challenging.

[Mr Virendra Sharma]

Does my hon. Friend agree that forced marriages and honour-based abuse are interlinked with child marriage, which has become child abuse?

[Sarah Champion]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and thank him for his decades of campaigning against this abhorrent practice.

The problem is that as things currently stand it is very hard to apply the forced marriage parameters to child marriage. That cannot be right. Let me give an example: if someone has been told from the age of four that they are going to marry their much older cousin, they of course accept that that is going to be normal. When they are then married at 16, whether registered or not, why would they challenge that? I argue that that is coercive control: that child has been brainwashed from a very young age. It is unacceptable that to get a prosecution, a child has to recognise that, go to the police and speak against their family, often with horrific consequences. That is why this new legislation is so necessary.

Until now, children living in England and Wales who are at risk of child marriage have too often been failed by the safeguarding professionals who should have protected them, leaving them to suffer the extreme and lifelong consequences of child abuse. Too often, we even hear about social workers who attend the religious marriages of 15-year-olds; where is their safeguarding head when they do that? As a country, we are signed up to the UN definition of a child being someone up to the age of 18. Legally, we accept that, yet in this country we also accept that a child can be married. I just do not understand that. I try, but the only logic that I can find, apart from historical reasons, is that we are confusing sexual consent with consent to be married.

I agree that at the age of 16 someone is aware of their body and should have some control over it. It is their right to be able to give consent, although unfortunately consent is often not sought by others. However, we recognise legally that someone is a child until age 18, which is most obvious from the fact that they have to go to school until the age of 16. Why is it that in this one area we do not allow that recognition?

I go back to the hypothetical child who gets married, say at 16, to someone 30 or 40 years older or even to someone in their 30s or 40s. For an indefinite period, that child will be subjected to abuse, and for two years it will be child abuse. Unless we pass this legislation, we are just accepting that.

Most cases are religious marriages. I know of an example: a friend of mine I met in my first year at university. We will call her Susan. She was married at 16 to a much older man. She was white British; he was a white American. I will not say that they were religious extremists, but they were both very fundamental in their religious beliefs. Susan had barely met the man. They had corresponded by letter for a year or so before they got married; he came to the country as soon as they were married. As she was married when she went to university, they got married quarters, and I would go and see them there. He was very aggressive and very abusive. I was thinking about it as I was walking in today: I vividly remember him pinning her down in front of me and spitting in her face, saying, “It is your duty to obey me. God says you have to obey me.”

I just could not believe it. I shame myself now by saying this: I used to see her next to me in psychology class, but until I started campaigning with the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire, I never recognised that Susan was in a child marriage—a forced marriage. I get chills as I think about that moment of recognition: “Wow—this is going on among us.”

Internationally, we should be leading the way. I talk to people in countries around the world and try to encourage them to increase their level of child protection, and the one answer that always comes back is, “You allow child marriage in the UK.” If we want to be seen internationally as a country that does the right thing—if we are to have any credibility whatever—we have to pass this legislation.

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[Andy Slaughter]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I know from the time we spent together on the Select Committee on Justice that he is very passionate about these matters. Last year, the figures were distorted by the pandemic, but before the pandemic the Forced Marriage Unit supported about 1,400 victims in any given year. That probably underestimates the problem substantially, with many cases going under the radar. The Home Office itself has said:

“Forced marriage is a hidden crime, and these figures will not reflect the full scale of the abuse.”

He is right to draw that to our attention. Everybody else has been very economical in their remarks, and I will attempt to do the same—

[Mr Virendra Sharma]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is about not only passing this Bill, but raising awareness? On forced marriages and other institutions, we need to go to the education system and all other participating institutions to promote the law, so that the children in schools are fully aware of their rights. That is the way forward, as Members have said.

[Andy Slaughter]

I am grateful for that intervention as well. It could be argued that this Bill is addressing a narrow and specific, albeit important, point, but the ramifications of the Bill go far wider in drawing attention to exactly the issues that my hon. Friend has raised. As the promoter of the Bill said, the current law is almost a century old and outdated—family life has moved on markedly since then. To take just one example, we now require young people to continue their education or take an apprenticeship up to the age of 18, so being able to marry below that age seems to be somewhat in conflict.

The state should always be hesitant about legislating and intruding on family life and relationships, but our record in the past 20 years is good. We have brought in progressive legislation on civil partnerships and same-sex marriage. I was pleased to sponsor, owing to a constituency connection, the Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc) Act 2019 promoted by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), which gave the rights of civil partnership already enjoyed by same-sex couples to opposite-sex couples, thus completing the equation of equal status.

There is more to do: we should legislate on humanist marriage and look at common-law marriage, where millions of people—women in particular—mistakenly find themselves without rights or assets on the death of their partner. However, the Bill is an important and substantial step forward. It is a progressive Bill, and the Opposition wish it well in its remaining stages.

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[Tom Pursglove]

I think my hon. Friend is probably referring to deputy chief constable Maggie Blyth being the first full-time national policing lead for violence against women and girls. I am certainly very willing to go away and try to find out more information on the points he has raised about her remit and precisely how that new role is going to make sure that he is aware of that important work. I think introducing that role was an important breakthrough. Again, that does not sit directly within my portfolio, but I am keen that my hon. Friends engage with him about that work.

[Mr Virendra Sharma]

I am so glad to hear that the Minister has recognised the best practices in many local authorities, including mine in Ealing. With such best practice, the number of forced marriages and honour-based abuse will be reduced. I am glad to be the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on honour-based abuse, and we promote that best practice. Can I ask the Minister if he is looking to make more of the relationship with India through the British high commission? India has recently increased its marriage consent age from 18 to 21, so could he take the best practice from there? We can get best practices from outside Britain as well, although the outside world is looking to Britain to be a guide on that.

[Tom Pursglove]

I thank the hon. Member for talking about the experiences in Ealing and the work his local authority is undertaking, as well as for the point about the international example, which we have talked about in some detail in this debate. Again, if I may, I will feed back to the safeguarding Minister the points he has raised, so that she is mindful of them in the work she is doing in this space.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire has explained, this Bill will also strengthen existing forced marriage legislation. It is critical that we end legal child marriage, but as long as children can be part of a ceremony of so-called marriage that is not recognised by the law, as many now are, the evil of child marriage will persist. We know that it is illegal to force a child—or, indeed, an adult—into marriage, but if coercion is not used there is no criminal sanction against the parent. To eliminate this loophole, the Bill rightly updates forced marriage legislation to ensure that it is always illegal to arrange the marriage of a child, whatever the practices used to bring it about.

This Government are committed to making sure that children and young people are both protected and supported as they grow and develop, in order to maximise their potential and their life chances. That includes having the opportunity to remain in education or training until they reach the age of 18. Child marriage can deprive them of these important life chances. The age of 18—not 16—is widely recognised as the age at which one becomes an adult. The Government believe that full citizenship rights should be gained at adulthood. A marriage or civil partnership is a lifelong commitment with significant legal and financial consequences, and this change will allow individuals more time to grow and mature before making a commitment of this nature.

In closing, I reiterate the key point that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire made in her remarks. I want to be crystal clear that this law is not about criminalising children who get married; it is about prosecuting the third parties that arrange the marriage. That point needs to be underscored at every turn and placed on the record. This debate is a big moment for my hon. Friend, who has run an exceptional campaign over many years. When we look back at this debate and the passage of this Bill, we will genuinely look at this as a significant social reform for the better, and probably one that we will think was long overdue. Hearing the stories of girls such as Payzee brings this issue to life and serves as a sobering reminder of why this legislation is so important. With that, I can confirm with great pleasure that the Government will be supporting the Bill’s passage through this House, and I look forward to its making speedy progress.