Thread: Britain: Spoon in Underwear

Spoon in underwear saving youths from forced marriage | The Raw Story

As Britain puts airport staff on alert to spot potential victims of forced marriage, one campaigning group
says the trick of putting a spoon in their underwear has saved some youngsters from a forced union in
their South Asian ancestral homelands.

The concealed spoon sets off the metal detector at the airport in Britain and the teenagers can be taken
away from their parents to be searched — a last chance to escape a largely hidden practice wrecking
the lives of unknown thousands of British youths.

The British school summer holidays, now well under way, mark a peak in reports of young people
— typically girls aged 15 and 16 — being taken abroad on “holiday”, for a marriage without consent, the
government says.

The bleep at airport security may be the last chance they get to escape a marriage to someone they
have never met in a country they have never seen.
The spoon trick is the brainchild of the Karma Nirvana charity, which supports victims and survivors of
forced marriage and honour-based abuse.

Based in Derby, central England, it fields 6,500 calls per year from around Britain but has almost reached
that point so far in 2013 as awareness of the issue grows.
When petrified youngsters ring, “if they don’t know exactly when it may happen or if it’s going to happen,
we advise them to put a spoon in their underwear,” said Natasha Rattu, Karma Nirvana’s operations manager.

“When they go though security, it will highlight this object in a private area and, if 16 or over, they will
be taken to a safe space where they have that one last opportunity to disclose they’re being forced to marry,”
she told AFP.

“We’ve had people ring and that it’s helped them and got them out of a dangerous situation. It’s an incredibly
difficult thing to do with your family around you — but they won’t be aware you have done it. It’s a safe way.”

The charity is working with airports — so far London Heathrow, Liverpool and Glasgow, with Birmingham to
come — to spot potential signs, such as one-way tickets, the time of year, age of the person and whether
they look uncomfortable.
“These are quite general points, but there are things that if you look collectively lead you to believe something
more sinister is going on,” said Rattu.

People who come forward can be escorted out of a secure airport exit to help outside.

Marriages without consent, or their refusal, have led to suicides and so-called honour killings, shocking a
nation widely deemed to have successfully absorbed immigrant communities and customs.

Officials fear the number of victims coming forward is just the tip of the iceberg, with few community leaders
prepared to speak out and risk losing their support base.

One woman, whose identity was protected by Essex Police in southeast England, was forced to get married
in India.

She said she was threatened by her father “because he said if I thought about running away he would find me
and kill me”.

“I was shipped off with a total stranger.

“That night I was raped by my husband and this abuse continued for about eight and half years of my life.”
She eventually fled.

Last year, the Foreign Office’s Forced Marriage Unit dealt with some 1,500 cases — 18 percent of them men.

A third of cases involved children aged under 17. The oldest victim was aged 71; the youngest just two.

The cases related to 60 countries: almost half were linked to Pakistan, 11 percent to Bangladesh, eight percent
to India, and two percent to Afghanistan. Other countries were Somalia, Turkey and Iraq.

Calls to Karma Nirvana tend to spike before the British school summer holidays and again at the end, said Rattu.

“The holidays are a really good time for young people to go missing because there is nobody accounting for where
they are at school,” she said.

Since Ramadan ended last week, calls have risen again, including one from an 18-year-old who has fallen pregnant
and her family is trying force her into marriage to conceal it.

Burdened by South Asian codes of “izzat”, or family honour, youngsters can be under extreme physical and emotional
duress to marry relatives in a culture and country they were not brought up in.

If they refuse, they are often threatened with being thrown out of the family — or worse.

“It really takes a brave person to stand up against their family,” said Rattu.




-

Well it would have helped the two in Peru, as they were forced to smuggle drugs? Oh wait...

^ but the spoon would have been unreachable by then

I'm gonna start eating my Indian food with a fork.

I know of two poor girls of Pakistani origin who I used to work with that were forced into unwanted marriages. Neither could believe that their family would do that to them. I did tell them that you could never trust a Paki (ok, I didn't, but it's true).

Originally Posted by youneverknow

widely deemed to have successfully absorbed immigrant communities and customs

interesting comment

I guess the spoon trick will result in several "honour" murders committed by angry dads and brothers.

Naturally that's purely a cultural thing, nothing religious about it, and as a multikulti society our culture should rightly embrace foreign nuances, esp since they have nothing to do with religion.

Originally Posted by youneverknow

The oldest victim was aged 71; the youngest just two.

Bloody hell.

Marrying the children off to relatives in Pakistan is a good scam to get more into the country and later citizenship.

Originally Posted by Thormaturge

I'm gonna start eating my Indian food with a fork.

Indian restaurants don't give a fork.

^9

Don't you go putting ideas into their heads.

Originally Posted by wasabi

Marrying the children off to relatives in Pakistan is a good scam to get more into the country and later citizenship.

It's also how the inbreds keep the family wealth together.

Originally Posted by Thormaturge

I'm gonna start eating my Indian food with a fork.

or not

10cm fork removed from man's penis
19 August 2013
Doctors in Australia have removed a 10-centimetre fork from inside an elderly man's penis after a bizarre sexual mishap.

The 70-year-old arrived at the Canberra Hospital emergency department with a bleeding sexual organ.

He told doctors he had inserted the 10cm dining fork into his urethra almost 12 hours earlier in an attempt to achieve sexual gratification.

But the utensil became stuck.

The fork was not visible but doctors were able to feel it from the outside and X-rays showed its position.

Doctors considered several retrieval options before deciding to pull the fork free using forceps and "copious lubrication" while the patient was under a general anaesthetic.