"I Didn't Want to Get Married": Using Zines to Increase Understanding About the 'Honour'-Based Abuse, Forced Marriage, and Modern Slavery Relationship

This project responds to international calls for the eradication of Forced Marriage (FM) as a form of modern slavery (MS) and violence against women and girls (see UN Sustainable Development Goals 5.2, 5.3, and 8.7) and from survivors for increased understanding of Honour Based Abuse (HBA) and FM in the UK beyond pre-conceived ideas about culture and religion. An estimated 15.4 million people experienced FM on any given day in 2016 and at least 5,000 are murdered in "honour" killings annually. An FOI request revealed that 11,000 cases of "honour" crime were recorded by UK police forces in 2010-2014. Recording these offences, and passing that information on to the Home Office, has been mandatory since 2019. In 2021, the Home Office produced "experimental statistics" on the results which revealed that 2383 HBA-related offences were recorded in the year ending March 2020, increasing to 2,725 in 2021. Though large, these numbers are a sign of under-reporting to police: Karma Nirvana (KN) have received over 80,000 calls to their HBA helpline (including FM) since 2008. In 2021, 7025 calls were tagged as being related to HBA, 2232 for FM, 93 for child marriage, 310 for modern slavery, and 21 for trafficking. Similarly, the UK government's Forced Marriage Unit handled 11,519 cases in 2012-2020. Under-reporting, lack of identification by organisations and individuals with statutory safeguarding responsibilities, uneven quality of support, and - in some cases - increased vulnerability for those who have reached out for help are all the result of a general lack of understanding and awareness of HBA and FM.
The proposed project is based on research conducted as part of Dr Helen McCabe's AHRC-funded project: "To Have and To Hold" Understanding the Relationship Between Forced Marriage and Modern Slavery' (AH/S012788/1) which sought to answer the normative problem of when, if ever, FM is MS. To enhance the value and wider benefit of this project to new user communities, we will work with survivors of HBA and FM in the UK to produce participatory artwork and a zine about HBA, FM, and their relationship to MS. KN's tagging of calls for modern slavery as well as FM and other forms of HBA highlights broader connections between these phenomena that remain unexplored. We will workshop our findings about FM and MS with survivors to gain their essential input and feedback and to ensure they have contextual information about the project.
We will collaborate with our project partners, Karma Nirvana (KN) and Survivor Arts Community (SAC) to co-develop a series of survivor workshops about their own experiences using participatory arts-based methods. Participants will be recruited from KN's Survivor Ambassador Panel (SAP) and SAC will lead in the implementation of workshops in which survivors will have the opportunity to tell their stories, connect, and build community in new creative ways. Art produced will be exhibited at events in Leeds, Nottingham and Glasgow, and survivors will have the opportunity to not only see their work in a public space, but to talk about the process and their lived experience. We will also create a zine featuring survivors' art, fiction, poetry, and educational information about HBA, FM, MS. Once printed, it will be made available in zine and women's libraries and at zine festivals in the UK. The zine will also be hosted online on our project website forcedmarriageresearch.ac.uk, and on project partners' websites.
Focus groups with members of the public will be used to assess the impact of our zine for changing assumptions about FM, HBA and their relationship to MS. We will record a podcast with informative information about HBA, FM and MS, and interviews with project partners. Impact findings will be published in a project report and policy briefings and at presentations to meetings of the APPG on 'Honour' Based Abuse, and at knowledge exchange workshops with the Forced Marriage Unit and anti-slavery organisations.