Some parents are
using forced marriage as a long-term care
option for people with learning
disabilities, a parliamentary meeting heard
last week.
Haji Saghir Alam,
a member of government disability advisory
body Equality 2025,
said some parents saw forced marriage as a
way of ensuring their learning disabled
children would be cared for when they could
no longer do so themselves.
Addressing
the
all-party parliamentary group for Voice UK,
which campaigns for access to justice for
people with learning disabilities, Alam said
some parents saw few other options for care
because of the breakdown of the extended
family and a lack of appropriate social
care.
Stigma
Alam, a
member of the Equality and Human Rights
Commission's disability committee, also
said parents were influenced by cultural
pressures, with marriage seen as a way
of avoiding the stimga related
to disability.
The Foreign
and Commonwealth Office's forced marriage
unit does not publish figures on the number
of cases involving people with learning
disabilities, but Alam said it was a
significant issue, particularly in the north
of England.
He said
tackling the problem required both the
"carrot and the stick", including promoting
independent living for disabled people from
south Asian communities.
Alam added:
"We need to give parents another option so
that they don't see forced marriage as a
long-term care option, but as a human rights
issue."
He also urged
the FCO to appoint a named lead on
disability at the forced marriage unit.
No
Secrets review
The all-party
group meeting also heard an update on the
Department of Health's review of the No
Secrets adult protection guidance from its
lead civil servant on the issue, Lucy
Bonnerjea.
She said the
review team had so far spoken to over 600
people and acknowledged the strong support
for putting adult protection on a statutory
footing, like child protection. This could
give social workers the right to enter
people's homes and place duties on relevant
agencies to work together.
But while she
said the DH was open to the idea, she added:
"We need to identify whether we do actually
need it. We need to work out what really
does make a difference."
She said the
DH was planning to publish a consultation
paper during the parliamentary summer
recess, which runs from the end of this
month to early October.
