Cousin marriage exacerbates the situation. If your father-in-law is also your mother’s brother, the pressure to keep quiet and avoid bringing shame on the family is stronger. It’s a big factor in the isolation of women and girls, raising questions about whether they can refuse when their families insist on cousin marriage.
Forced marriage is a term we hear a lot of in relation to these communities. With good reason.
One of its purposes is to keep wealth within the family. The independent MP Iqbal Mohamed acknowledged as much when he said in the House of Commons that cousin marriage “helps put families on a more secure financial foothold”. These are presumably the “economic advantages” referred to in the new NHS guidance, exposing the naïveté of taking such statements at face value.
Cousin marriage is practised in patriarchal cultures where men hold the power. It’s a way of maintaining the status quo and that may mean persuading teenage girls to marry instead of finishing their education, for example. It perpetuates existing inequalities, and it’s mothers who shoulder most of the responsibility of caring for disabled children.
There was a time when institutions like the NHS would have prioritised health over everything else. Now, though, it seems to be run on a principle of not causing offence to anyone, even if that means abandoning evidence. Anyone except women, that is, given that they are the big losers in this shift to ideology-based medicine.
[Indenting is a problem here for the moment – don’t ask – so I’ve italicised the paragraphs from the article, with my comments not italicised.]
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