Response to Forced Marriage: Excavating Community Engagement and

Government plans to criminalise forced marriage have intensified debate over how to address the practice without alienating communities. Feminist and Critical Race litera-ture on forced marriage castigates the government for treating forced marriage as a cultural event fostered by a deviant and alien ‘other ’ and for seeking to ‘liberate ’ women from their culture, but itself views community with suspicion and denies subject agency. Re-examining policy developments through personal experience – setting up the Forced Marriage Unit – I excavate the now forgotten imperative of community engagement and how government became invested in its exclusion. Given the porosity of the forced– arranged marriage distinction I then examine why engaging community is important. Young British Asians ’ experience of the marriage process puts high value on family and community involvement. This power-laden paradigm, where consensus is valued over the Western liberal concept of ‘free consent’, is the context into which government policy must fit. Corresponding author