Talking a stand against forced marriages

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Secrets of the Henna Girl

When UK-based writer Sufiya Ahmad was 14, one of her classmates simply didn’t show up to school on the first day of a new term. Everyone knew that she had been taken to Pakistan to be married off, but Sufiya didn’t think about it too much.

Years later, when she was working as a researcher for an MP in the House of Commons, she would come across stories of many more Asian women who’d been victims of forced marriages. Listening to the accounts of survivors, India-born Sufiya felt compelled to write Secrets of the Henna Girl, a fictitious account of a Pakistani-British teen called Zeba who is pressured by her family to enter into an arranged marriage.
The book, published by Puffin, earned Sufiya a win in the Published Writer of the Year category at the Brit Writers Awards last month.
Her work with survivors of forced marriages was revelatory in many ways. Sufiya recounts how a friend, a director of the UK Crown Prosecution Service, described a forced marriage as an earthquake, with a tsunami of abuse following it in the form of domestic violence, marital rape and even child protection issues.
“You always think that a victim of any type of abuse would flee their oppressor in an instant, but that isn’t the case. The issue of guilt was discussed quite a bit, because in all these cases, the people doing the forcing are the parents and a girl or a boy would always feel guilty when going against their parents’ wishes,” explains Sufiya.
She adds, “There are a number of reasons for this, mainly ‘what will the community think’, ‘izzat’ or even health concerns (feigned or otherwise) of parents who are shocked that their offspring are not as malleable as they probably were in their youth.”