(2) what estimate he has made of the number of vulnerable people who have been forced to marry against their will as a result of a financial agreement between their family members and a foreign national seeking UK citizenship.
The Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) provides confidential information and assistance to potential victims of forced marriage, those who have already been forced to marry and concerned professionals. The FMU also works with partners both in the UK and overseas to ensure that appropriate action is taken to prevent forced marriage from taking place.
In the last two years over 1,600 incidences of suspected forced marriage were reported in each year to the FMU. Forced marriage is, by its nature, an underground practice and therefore detailed statistics on the scale of the problem and patterns of abuse are not fully known. While the FMU is aware of some of the key motivators for forcing a person to marry and has seen cases where both these issues appear to be a factor among those with learning and physical disabilities, we do not collect specific data on the motivators as it is not always possible to clearly identify one particular cause.
However, data on the number of suspected incidences of forced marriage that involved a person with learning and or physical difficulties have been collected since August 2009. From August 2009 to the end of January 2010 at least 18 cases involving people with learning difficulties and seven cases involving people with physical difficulties were reported to the FMU.
In July last year the FMU published revised Multi-agency Practice Guidelines which provide step by step guidance for frontline professionals on how to deal with cases of forced marriage, including cases that may involve children and adults with support needs.
The FMU is also funding research to look at the prevalence of forced marriage among those with learning disabilities. One of the objectives of the research will be to examine the motivations for forcing people with learning difficulties into marriage.