Drawing on Forced Marriage: Teaching Tough Topics Through Comics

Forced marriage is a global problem. The International Labour Organisation and Walk Free estimated that at least 15.4 million people were in a forced marriage on any given day in 2017. The UK's Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) dealt with, on average, 1350 cases each year between 2011 and 2019 (and 753 in 2020, despite the global Covid-19 pandemic). Forced marriage is a human rights violation that is illegal in the UK, and States have committed to ending this harmful practice by 2030 as part of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Participants in the 65th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (2021) identified education as the key factor to tackle forced marriage.
The proposed project responds to this call from the international community as well as schools in Liverpool and Nottingham for improved education about forced marriage. Based on our existing research conducted as part of the project '"To Have and To Hold": Understanding the Relationship Between Forced Marriage and Modern Slavery', we will develop a comic about forced marriage. It will provide contextual information about forced marriage around the world and focus on different forms, drivers and consequences of forced marriage in the UK, the agency and resistance of victim-survivors, and possibilities for interventions to provide psychological, socio-economic and legal support. Using the comic as teaching material, we will conduct workshops with secondary schools to educate Year 7-10 students about forced marriage and support them to become allies of those at risk or already experiencing this harmful practice. Using Likert scale questionnaires to measure impact, we will prove that comics are an effective medium to improve pupil's alertness and abilities to talk about forced marriage in an informed way so that they are comfortable raising the issue and more likely to support those at risk or already experiencing this harmful practice. This will support young people's development as active citizens. Comics can achieve this because they tell nuanced stories in an accessible and inclusive way that motivates readers to act for a better world.
To achieve our overarching aim to improve education about forced marriage, we will collaborate with the artist Ms Emma Brown who will develop the comic, the Relationship and Sex Education Consultant for Nottingham City Council, Catherine Kirk, staff and students from Nottingham Girls' Academy and Archbishop Blanch School who will provide feedback on the comic and participate in comic-based workshops about forced marriage, and the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) Karma Nirvana and Savera who will also support the development of the comic and the workshop plan based on their work with survivors of forced marriage and those as risk and their experience of conducting educational outreach work. We will share our findings with Liverpool and Nottingham City Council and wider stakeholders (other schools, NGOs and local governments, youth and community groups, the FMU, Department for Education, police, social workers, health professionals and legal practitioners), aiming for wider dissemination and increased uptake as well as to input the comic in the cities' standard Personal, Social, Health and Economic education curriculum and to explore opportunities to adjust it for primary education.
The comic, together with a teaching pack that we will develop in collaboration with Savera, will be made freely available in digital form for other educators to run similar workshops in the future. Our proposal is therefore a pilot for further impact across the UK.
To advocate the use of innovative and creative impact activities to engage with wider audiences, user communities and stakeholders, we will produce a podcast, blog posts, and a report about the project, our findings, and lessons learned aimed at researchers, educators, students, artists, NGOs, community groups, youth groups, and local government.