Forced marriage – one woman's escape

Jasvinder, 43, lives with her three children in Derby. She founded Karma Nirvana in 1994.

I come from a family of seven sisters, and I watched each of them disappear. They'd be taken out of school, sent abroad, and brought back as wives. When I was 14 my mother showed me a photo of the man I'd been promised to since I was eight years old. I refused to marry him, and for that I was abused, physically and mentally - my sisters told me I would give my dad a heart attack, or my mum would get cancer if I kept fighting them. At 15, they locked me in my room until I agreed to the marriage. I took an overdose as a protest, and my sister refused to get me medical attention. They wore me down. My friends at the time were concentrating on discos, boys. Of course I wasn't allowed to socialise, even before being locked away - white people were dirty to my parents. I had a boyfriend at the time, secretly.

At the age of 16, Jasvinder Sanghera ran away from home rather than be forced to marry a man she had never met. She now runs a charity, Karma Nirvana, that helps girls facing forced marriages, and is the author of two books