A 45-year-old Pakistani-origin woman was today sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail by a British court for taking her teenage daughter to Pakistan and forcing her to marry a man 16 years her senior, in the first successful prosecution of its kind in the UK.
The woman, who is from Birmingham but cannot be named for legal reasons, was found guilty of one count of forced marriage, one count of practising deception with the intention of causing another person to leave the country for the purpose of a forced marriage, and one count of perjury at a trial in Birmingham Crown Court yesterday.
Judge Patrick Thomas QC told the defendant: "You had cruelly deceived her. She was frightened, alone, held against her will, being forced into a marriage she dreaded. You must have known that was her state of mind. Yet for your own purposes, you drove the marriage through."
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