How many forced marriages take place in the UK each year?

"As many as 10,000 forced marriages take place in the UK every year, according to the Crown Prosecution Service."

The Times, 4 August 2012

After the tragic case of Shafilea Ahmed, the government's decision, announced two months ago, to make forced marriage a criminal offence has intensified the media spotlight on the issue and prevalence of forced marriage.

According to the Times (citing the Crown Prosecution Service), some 10,000 weddings take place against their participants' wills in the UK every year.

For Full Fact readers with long memories, this might sound suspect. Last year we found that the Daily Mail had overstated the number of such marriages known to the authorities when it reported that 8,000 British girls are forced into marriages per year.

So can there really be 10,000 forced marriages in the UK every year?

Analysis

The source of the Times' data can be traced to Mr Nazir Afzal, a Chief Crown Prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), albeit inconsistently.

David Simpson MP quoted Mr Afzal in the House of Commons in March 2011 saying that "10,000 forced marriages or threats" occured in Britain annually. Whereas the BBC claimed Mr Afzal told them that "10,000 forced marriages" occur in Britain every year as part of thier Panorama on Honour Killings in March 2012.

The lessons learnt from Full Fact's previous factcheck on forced marriages highlight the significance of the difference between including "threats of forced marriages" in estimations of the prevalence of forced marriage.

Back then we found that of the 8,000 cases cited by the Mail, nearly two thirds referred to threats of forced marriage, rather than to actual weddings that had taken place.

To try to pin down exactly what the 10,000 figure referred to, we contacted Mr Afzal's office in the hope of clarification.

Mr Afzal's office replied, claiming he had been "misquoted" in the press. Mr Afzal originally told the BBC for their Panorama program that there were "probably 10,000 forced marriages or threats of marriages a year." 

This was his own estimation, based on the figure of 8,000 threats or forced marriages found in the 2008 Department for Children, Schools and Families report that underpinned the Mail's claim "and his own knowledge gained from his association and meetings with local authorities and a number of voluntary organisations offering support on forced marriage." 

As we found when we looked at the report last year, there is good reason for thinking that the 8,000 figure underestimates the scale of the problem, given that it only encompasses those cases of which the authorities are aware. However the extra 2,000 cases added to the total by Mr Afzal is best considered an informed estimate based on the anectdotal evidence he has accrued, rather than as a definitive figure.

As the 2008 report noted, the true figure could be much higher or lower. It noted the difficulty in getting a full picture of the prevalence of forced marriage in the UK, due to a lack of systematic collection of data.

In this report, the estimation of "8,000 forced marriages or threats  of marriages" was formed from the limited data available, using surveys of the caseloads of local authorities dealing with forced marriage cases, as well as data from the two main national authorities; the government's Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) and Karma Nirvana, a charity supporting victims and survivors of forced marriages.

Since this report, there has been no further systematic attempt to provide a more contemporary estimate.  Mr Afzal's higher total of 10,000 threats or forced marriages is the only update around.

However, the latest Home Affairs Committee report on forced marriage in 2011 - which investigated the progress of the recommendations made in the 2008 DCSF report - supports Mr Afzal's conclusion that the true figure is higher than 8,000.

According to the Committee's report, recent years have seen an increase in the number of forced marriage cases dealt with by the FMU. In 2008, at the time of the previous report, FMU's caseload was about 300 per year. This increased to 430 in 2009, and remained at approximately 400 per year in 2010 and 2011.

FMU's statistics are not readily available online, but after contacting the Unit, a number of things were clarified. In 2011, the FMU received 1,468 calls over the year, from numerous sources, and 400 were taken up as "live" cases, where the Unit provided assistance to an individual. Since 2008, there has been an increase in the number of cases the FMU has dealt with, although not necessarily in the number that it is aware of. 

According to the Committee report, Karma Nirvana has also dealt with an increasing number of calls to their national hotline since 2008. This peaked at a figure of 5,599 a year. Full Fact has tried to contact Karma Nirvana for their latest statistics and has yet to hear back, but Mr Afzal said that the number of calls coming in in 2011 was 5,001.

Of course these increases could reflect a greater willingness to tackle forced marriages by alerting the authorities rather than an increase in the numbers actually taking place.

Conclusion

Overall, it is clear that The Times' use of the figure of "10,000 forced marriages a year" should be treated with caution.

The source of the claim, Mr Afzal, never purported it to be anything other than an estimate, based on the highly limited data available and his own experience. 

More importantly however, the figure includes cases where there is a threat of forced marriage rather than marriages that have actually taken place, a point which the Times appears to miss.