One of the personal professional International  interests of the CEO,  revolves around HEALTH TOURISM.

It is interesting to find on the official website of THE FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE a raft of information and links on FORCED MARRIAGES.

This was a subject introduced by our chair Pete Morgan during mid 2009. Details and links from the FCO website can be found at http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/

The article which was found in the June 2009 newsletter is reproduced below.

Forced Marriages – some dilemmas for practitioners

The recent implementation of the Forced Marriage Orders has brought the question of forced marriages back to practitioners’ attention, not just in Children's Services but also in Adult Services as well. This is not to suggest that practitioners have not been aware of the potential for forced marriages to be imposed on service users, but that there has been a degree of fatalism about the ability of social care and criminal justice agencies to be proactive to prevent them. This has changed with the Forced Marriage Orders and the Police’s willingness to use the powers they provide.

Any consideration of Forced Marriages has to start with a definition of what a forced marriage is. It is not the same as an arranged marriage, which is a marriage that is agreed to by both parties but which has been brokered by their families on the understanding that either party can say “No” to the marriage. Arranged marriages have been part of many cultures for centuries, if not as long as identifiable cultures have existed. They have been a means of cementing societies together internally and with other groupings. As such, they are accepted and condoned within the major religions of the world.

Forced marriages on the other hand, are imposed on either or both parties whether they agree to them or not and whether they are able to agree to them or not. Pressure can be exerted by family members, friends, societal expectations, societal or religious elders for a number of reasons and can take the form of physical violence or even, in extreme cases, death in the form of ‘honour killings’. They are not accepted or condoned by any of the major world religions and are specifically illegal in some countries. There is a danger that they are perceived as the property of a single religion or culture and any action to prevent them as an assault on that religion or culture. That perception is untrue and should be rebuffed at every opportunity

The public perception of forced marriages, as propounded by the media, is very much of teenage girls being taken abroad to marry a partner chosen for them by their family, whether explicitly or without their being aware of the planned marriage. The second variation, of which there is less public awareness, is of young women being brought to this country to marry someone they haven’t met and being abused by the family they marry into. What is not often considered is the risk that is posed to vulnerable adults of being married when they either don’t consent to the arrangements or are unable, due to their disability, to do so. This can happen either by them being taken abroad or by the prospective partner coming to this country for the wedding. It can often, whoever the ‘victim’ is, be the former in order to enable the new partner to enter this country. I apologise for the use of the term ‘victim’, and hope I cause no offence by using it, but I’m not sure what alternative term would be more appropriate.

The revised expectations of local authorities, and of the former social services departments in particular, raise the question of who of the above are legitimately our service users and even, in the case of PAVAUK, who are ‘we’? Logically, any potential ‘victims’ under the age of eighteen are children from the perspective of social care services, but anybody over that age is potentially eligible for local authority services if they are the victims of a forced marriage. There are also those individuals who are not eligible for public resources due to the nature of their entry into this country, but this article draws no distinction between them and those who are so eligible. My own view is that it is necessary to retain the distinction between those who are vulnerable adults as defined in No Secrets and those who are not. This is not to deny that all citizens should have access to services to empower and safeguard their human rights, nor is it to deny the right of vulnerable adults as defined in No Secrets to access those same services or services that can meet their particular circumstances and needs.

This article is therefore predicated on the principle that social and health care professionals should continue to work with those who meet the criteria for community care services rather than expand their constituency to include all those who may be the victims of a forced marriage. This therefore raises the question of the linkage between care planning and protection planning in these cases and the question of transition planning for those who are eligible for services as children/young people but then become eighteen years of age.

The development of the role of the human rights agenda in the provision of social care means that all community care assessments should address the capacity and ability of the service user to exercise their human rights as citizens, which includes the right to a family life and thereby an active sex life. In the case of young people and adults who are assessed as lacking the capacity to exercise these human rights, their care plans need to address how these rights are to be addressed. This will need to address the means by which these rights will be met, but in a way that ensures the safety of the service user, the staff working with them and their fellow service users. This will enable appropriate care plans to be agreed and protection plans to be put in place if it appears that the service users human rights are going to be/is being violated in some way. This will be particularly important and complex for young people in the transition process to adult services and/or to the status of ‘young person’ under the Mental Capacity Act.

A recent case identified a particular difficulty with regard to forced marriages and Forced Marriage Orders; in order to apply for an Order, it is necessary to place evidence before a court. Evidence is almost inevitably circumstantial unless one delays until the marriage has taken place or the service user has been moved in preparation for the forced marriage. If it is the case that one partner does not have the capacity to consent to the marriage, then delaying action in order to gather actual as opposed to circumstantial evidence can mean risking the service user being also a victim of sexual assault or rape if the marriage is consummated. This particular case highlighted the potential conflict between legal advice designed to protect the local authority and advice designed to protect the service user. Local authority lawyers are obliged to provide advice to their clients, namely the local authority, while the local authority has a duty of care to the service user. The resulting impasse led to the Police applying to the courts for an order rather than the local authority, which does seem to me to be a failure of the care management process to evolve into the safeguarding process to protect the service user. It ought to be possible for the local authority to acknowledge the need to place circumstantial evidence before a court in the best interests of one of their clients.

This has to be the case where the Mental Capacity Act applies to the service user and systems need to be put in place to enable this to happen. These will have to be based on movement along the continuum from care planning to protection planning and back again once the immediate risk to the service user has been met. The protection plan must, in time, either no longer be necessary or be absorbed into the care plan as part of the ongoing means of empowering the service user and meeting their human rights.

Unless this movement is facilitated, good practice is not possible in this area of work as multi-agency work will not be able to take place in any co-ordinated way.

The care management process has to take into account the implications of the cultural background of the service user. The impact of the service user’s cultural background may well affect the perceptions of what it means to be an adult within that culture.

This is often bound into the ability to become parents, the roles of spouses of either gender, the role of marriage in uniting a society, of stabilising the ownership of property, or of uniting families and other social groupings for political purposes and the roles of either genders.

The potential conflict between the expectations and standards of different cultures is another dilemma for practitioners. This can itself be further compounded by the cultural background of the practitioner themselves.

There are no easy solutions to the dilemmas that I have identified above, and these are not the only dilemmas that practitioners face in working with service users who face either the risk or the reality of a forced marriage.

However, good social care practice that recognises the need to respect service user’s human rights and to empower them to exercise those rights can provide a strong and robust basis on which to work through those dilemmas with the service user, their families and the cultural structures within which they live.

It does, however, require local authorities to recognise that, to empower service users, it is necessary to empower staff and to enable them to be risk managers rather than to be risk averse.

It also requires other agencies, with different professional and operational cultures and performance indicators to be able to accommodate a human rights perspective in their approach to working with service users who may be or at risk of being a party to a forced marriage.

Copyright Pavauk 01022010
 

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