Newcastle remembers victims of honour based violence
A survivor of forced marriage tells Metro Radio it made her suicidal, ahead of a national memorial day in Newcastle.
As victims of honour based violence are remembered in Newcastle today, one survivor tells us she felt abandoned and suicidal.
Leading UK charity for forced marriage and honour-based violence, Karma Nirvana, in partnership with Safe Newcastle, is hosting the second annual Day of Remembrance to honour the memories of both men and women affected by forced marriages and honour killings.
Rubie was just 15 years old when she was forced to marry in Bangladesh, escaping back to the UK only to have her husband follow her.
She said the experience made her feel like a prostitute. Now Rubie is a model and campaigns for schools to offer more protection to vulnerable pupils, something she lacked.
“It ripples throughout your whole life. You can never get over it… My school didn’t chase up on it when I didn’t come back. It was like I had vanished. The signs were all there but nobody intervened. It needs to be monitored.
“Nobody wanted to know where I was, I was absent for a year in school. I think there desperately needs to be something done in that sector.”
Cllr Dipu Ahad, from Newcastle City Council, said: “It’s a huge issue in the North East and what we see is that people are brushing issues such as honour based violence, domestic violence and forced marriages from certain communities under the carpet because of honour and family reputation.
“There’s many cases in Newcastle that I’ve come across, I was dealing with a case just yesterday. We jointly need to support them. organisations, local authorities, police and the communities need to understand that women should not suffer in silence.”
Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner, Vera Baird, said:
“The truth about our own region is that there are not that many reports and so there is a bit of an iceberg problem. We don’t know if that is because this persuasion, this cultural advertising about the criminality of this is working or whether we’re still not getting people to report as we would wish.
“We’ve done a good deal of work, it’s think it’s the kind of work we need to keep doing and doing and doing and not stop because there won’t come a time when everybody has heard the message if we don’t just keep talking about it.”
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