Mention forced marriages and the image that immediately springs to mind is some poor teenage girl being traded like a prize cow to a guy she’s never met. Today’s Guardian, however, has a rather different take on the issue. The UK now has something called the Forced Marriage Unit, which aims to help people being dragooned into matrimony against their will. Last year around 13% of their calls were from men. The Guardian’s Amelia Hill explains:

Men report being forced into marriage because they are gay or bisexual, or because their families suspect that they are. But it can also be a result of family commitments to relatives abroad or their own expectations, securing visas or an attempt to control their son’s behaviour or protect a family’s reputation.

As with forced marriages of women, the motivations here are either a desire to avoid “shame”, or the use of children as property in some transaction. The consequences for the boys concerned can be quite severe:

Just two weeks ago, the FMU took a call from a young man living in Leicester whose family had locked him in his bedroom after discovering that he was gay. He told the FMU that his family were downstairs, discussing whether to take him to India and either kill him, abandon him there or marry him off.

The FMU reports that calls from boys last year were up by 65% on the year before, and they look like rising again this year. As the article notes, the biggest problem for boys (and even men) in such situations is that people don’t believe that such things happen. This reminds me of an email exchange I had a couple of weeks ago over a tweet I made about domestic abuse. Again there are men who have been victims of violent wives — I happen to know a couple — but way too many people refuse to take such things seriously.

At root this is really just another example of the failure of the binary. Not all men are aggressive and domineering; not all women are meek and inoffensive. Anyone can become a victim.