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The recent case of the Birmingham woman who was given a jail sentence for duping her 17-year-old daughter into travelling abroad and forcing her into marriage, has once again shone light on this most abusive practice. Threatening to rip up her daughters’ passport if she didn’t marry the 34-year old Pakistani national, her conviction is the first successful prosecution of its type even though thousands of cases of forced marriages are reported to charities and helplines every year. While forced marriages became illegal in 2014, experts are increasingly urging the government to give people suffering this experience the same protection as those suffering other forms of exploitation. They argue that there are parallels with modern day slavery which as the lawyer and advisor to the UN Parosha Chandran argues `doesn’t require in law that you own somebody. Instead it means you treat someone as if they were your property.’ It seems to me that marriage remains one of the biggest cultural challenges within many Islamic and other Asian and south Asian cultures. While the virtues of arranged marriages are often extolled as harmonious consensual arrangements between families, forced marriages ignore consent and young people find themselves tricked or relenting to family pressures. Without mutual consent, there is no marriage but how that consent is acquired or ignored can be the very root of the problem. It seems that the Islamic tradition which recognises and celebrates the power of human desire and the sexual impulse, has nevertheless created communities which today are struggling with that other great need – human freedom. Freedom can be a loaded word especially when young men and women feel psychologically, emotionally and physically trapped by family and tradition. People end up living lives of deception because they are too afraid to be open about what they themselves want. It’s not easy to break such ties but we should condemn those oppressive and violent practices which deny young people their desire to be and to be free. There is no love when parental love turns into parental control. Forced marriages are only the symptom of a deeper cultural malaise amongst many families. Concepts of honour and shame are exploited to their full, and notions of chastity and modesty almost exclusively linked to a growing gender segregation, have created their own problems. And while both young men and women can suffer the consequences of family control, it’s very often women who carry the weight of tradition. For me the greatest challenge facing many Muslim women is fear of what others will say. And that’s why the qur’anic imperative that God will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves is about giving us the responsibility – that nothing is impossible if we have the will and the courage to change it.