And if they fail to cobble together a repayment that can reach nearly $1,000 within six months, the Foreign Office adds a 10 percent surcharge on anything they still owe. For some women, that means using university loans or public benefit funds for their flight home.
Those disclosures, made in a series of articles in The Times of London in recent days, have spurred outrage in Parliament and drawn a promise from Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt on Wednesday that he would solicit fresh advice on the policy.
“Of course, we should always behave with compassion and humanity in every situation,” he said in a radio interview, “but I want to get to the bottom of this particular issue.”
The Foreign Office helped bring home 27 survivors of forced marriages in 2017 and 55 the year before, according to government figures obtained by The Times of London under freedom of information laws. The biggest number of cases was in Pakistan, and not every woman required government loans to fly home to Britain.
Aisha K. Gill, a professor of criminology at the University of Roehampton who has written extensively about forced marriage, said the punitive loans undermined the work of the British government to help rescue survivors.
“In my view, protection shouldn’t have a price tag,” she said in an interview. “They should not be punished for seeking protection from the consulate.”
Gill said the fact that such a policy exists speaks to people’s tendency to diminish the coercion and abuse that are central to forced marriages.
The government intervenes on behalf of people who are imprisoned abroad without asking for payment, Gill said. But the fact that many of the survivors of forced marriages are immigrants, or come from families that recently immigrated, she added, seemed to make them less sympathetic in the public’s eye.
The government’s repayment policy is an extension of its approach to British tourists or other citizens who get in trouble abroad and need help returning to the United Kingdom. People 18 years or older have to reimburse the government.
That age limit came into effect after The Guardian newspaper reported two years ago on a 17-year-old British teenager who sought help at the British embassy in Islamabad to escape a forced marriage in 2014. She had to sign a loan agreement and hand in her British passport before being allowed to return to the United Kingdom, and ultimately was billed more than $1,000, with her passport being held until she paid.
After that, 16- and 17-year-olds became exempt from the reimbursement policy.
The Times of London reported on four British women who were each charged roughly $900 for the government’s efforts to free them from a religious institution in Somalia where they said they had been chained, whipped and told they would be held until they married. The women’s families sent them there because they thought the women were too independent.
Ayaan, 24, who had been at the institution for two years, said she signed a loan agreement on the day she was rescued.
“I was left to fend for myself,” she told The Times of London. “The loan has caused so much anxiety.”
Just as the government would not charge a crime victim for investigating a crime, it should not charge women for bringing them back home, said Alison Gardner, an assistant professor of sociology who studies modern slavery at the University of Nottingham. She said a $1,000 debt could be devastating for a young woman whose family has tried to force her to marry and could disown her if she escaped.
“It’s an example of this general policy of pushing costs onto the people who have incurred the misfortune, which drives a cycle of increased vulnerability,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said in a statement: “We recognize that an emergency loan can help remove a distressed or vulnerable person from risk when they have no other options, but as they are from public funds we have an obligation to recover the money in due course.”
The spokeswoman said the government also gives money to safe houses and other organizations that do not charge British survivors of forced marriages for help finding them a place of safety.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.