---

Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [HL]

I have been looking at the proposed new section on guidance and the provision that persons exercising public functions will have a duty. I remember that when I was principal of Somerville College and I visited schools, there came a time in the mid-1980s when I no longer found Muslim girls in sixth forms. I was told that it was because they were being withdrawn from school at 13 and were often then taken back to their villages where a marriage took place. I used to say that that seemed to be breaking the law because those girls had a right to education and we have a duty to provide it. If that, among other things, could be enforced, it is much easier for people to cease to do something bad if there is a perfectly respectable reason not to do it, which has nothing to do with marriage or anything else. If it could be known in the community that girls could not be withdrawn legally until they were 16, that might begin to start a measure of protection for the peculiarly unprotected very young.