No Way Out

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No Way Out

Hands and chains

Global Perspective is the BBC World Service's international documentary series.

Each year the BBC World Service collaborates with radio stations from around the world to make a documentary series on a contemporary subject of international importance and interest.

Each partner station contributes a documentary which gives a local interpretation of the chosen theme, and this year the theme is Escape.

Programme Two: No Way Out

Shazia Khan, for BBC World Service, meets some young women in the UK for whom attempting escape from abusive marriages means risking murder by the men in their own families.

According to official statistics, one woman a month is killed in the UK by her family in the name of honour, usually because she has rejected or tried to escape from a forced marriage, or has found a partner to love of her own choosing.

Each year over 300 cases of forced marriage are dealt with by the Forced Marriage Unit set up by the British government.

But campaigners suspect that the figures are much higher, with women being driven to kill themselves out of desperation, or murders being disguised to look like suicide.

Honour killing

Though honour killing is sometimes thought to be a Muslim problem, it occurs in many patriarchal communities around the world, including Hindu, Sikh and Christian too.

Presenter Shazia Khan, who is herself a Muslim of Pakistani descent, is troubled that forced marriage and honour killings take place in her own Pakistani community. She is concerned that young men of her own generation, born or brought up in the UK, are prepared to go so far as to kill to preserve their family name.

Shazia talks to three women, one of them in hiding in fear of her life, about why they have become targets of such rage and threatened violence and how the very people who they would have hoped would protect them have turned on them.

For the women who have challenged their family's expectations, it can feel as if there is 'No Way Out', a life-long price to pay.

First broadcast on March 28 2008

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