Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many cases the Forced Marriage Unit has dealt with since its inception; and how many such cases have been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The UK is a world-leader in the fight to stamp out the brutal practice of forced marriage, with our joint Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) leading efforts to combat it both at home and abroad. We made forced marriage a criminal offence in 2014 to better protect victims and send a clear message that this abhorrent practice is totally unacceptable and will not be tolerated in the UK.

Figures on the number of cases reported to the FMU via its public helpline and email inbox are published annually on GOV.uk at:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/forced-marriage#statistics-on-forced-marriage-collected-by-fmu

The FMU acts in an advisory capacity and therefore does not refer cases directly to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). The FMU will refer cases to the police. The police will consider when to refer a case to the CPS, who will take a decision as to whether a prosecution should be brought.

The recent CPS Violence Against Women and Girls Crime Report, published in September 2016, shows that the volume of forced marriage prosecutions completed in 2015-16 rose to 53 – a rise from 46 in 2014-15.