More than 3,000 Asian children vanishing from school and 'forced into arranged marriages'

The number of young British Asians being forced into arranged marriages abroad could be as high as 3,000 a year - ten times official estimates.

Fears over the scale of a practice described as 'abhorrent' by a Muslim Tory peer were revealed yesterday in a Home Office-funded study.

The research came as a select committee investigating the disappearance of children from school rolls revealed that more than 2,000 pupils were unaccounted for in 14 areas of the country.

It is thought that a proportion of these are girls who have been removed from education and forced into marriages overseas.

The Government's forced marriage unit investigates 300 "hardcore" cases a year, some involving young women and even men, but many victims are girls still young enough to be at school.

Sometimes the marriages are arranged by parents fearful that their children have become too "westernised".

However, management consultant Dr Nazia Khanum, who wrote the latest study, said: "If you follow the examples of rape and domestic violence, where only 10 per cent to 12 per cent of cases are reported, it's a reasonable assumption that it is the tip of the iceberg."

To support her case, Dr Khanum pointed out that 300 forced marriages were reported to the authorities in Luton alone each year.

She accepted that these inquiries did not necessarily relate to hardcore cases, but argued: "It still indicates the scale of the problem of forced marriages, which are unacceptable, and condemned by all religions.

"Forced marriage has nothing to do with religion - it is part of a patriarchal system where parents believe they know what is best for their children."

Scroll down for more...

Baroness Warsi, a Muslim peer and the Tories' spokesman for community cohesion, said forced marriages must be treated as a crime to send the signal they are intolerable.

She said they must be treated in the same way as domestic violence, stating there could be no arguments to condone the practice even in a multicultural Britain.

She said: "This is not a culturally sensitive issue - this is an abhorrent act which we must stand together on."

But Home Office minister Lord West of Spithead said there were difficulties in outlawing forced marriage.

He said: "The difficulty is that these things happen in families. There is a feeling that the crime would go even further underground."

The study followed revelations last week that 33 girls were missing from schools in Bradford despite extensive efforts to locate them, amid fears that they were pressured into marriages abroad.

The Home Affairs Select Committee has demanded answers in Parliament-and yesterday its chairman Keith Vaz said that an investigation into 14 more local authorities of concern had revealed 2,089 children missing from school registers.

The information details only youngsters who have vanished from school rolls, and not the reasons why they have done so.

Mr Vaz's committee wants officials to "dig deeper" on the reasons to establish the extent to which forced marriage is to blame.

Councils deny the problem is widespread, but one teenage girl from a Pakistani family yesterday told how she was pulled out of school when she was just 13, taken to Pakistan and forced to marry a man who assaulted, abused and raped her.

The girl, whose identity is being kept secret, said she prayed someone back in England would report her disappearance and come looking for her but nothing happened.

"I think they let me down," she said.