SPEAK NOW, or forever hold your peace: today is the last day for the submission of opinions for the joint consultation paper, from the Home and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices, on the vexed matter of forced marriages. It will then be for ministers to decide whether the paper’s conclusions support the introduction of a new law to allow prosecution of those responsible for such unions, including parents, clerics and imams. Meanwhile, last week, in both Manchester and Cambridgeshire, police forces pre-empted that decision with vows to demonstrate more vigorous application of the laws already available: harassment, assault and abduction among them.

It’s a worthy attempt to stamp on a reprehensible practice. But their age-old problems will lie in, first, trying to establish what is meant by “forced” — dragged by the hair and screaming all the way to Islamabad airport is clear enough; private hints of excommunication from family are less so and a simple desire not to disappoint lesser still — and, secondly, how to know when or if it is happening. The suggestion that girls might routinely dob in their parents to be jailed is clearly unrealistic.

There is, however, one measure that could sort both problems at once; a far speedier sleight of government that could do a great deal to help the most vulnerable — that is, the removal, regardless of ethnicity, of the anachronism that is the child bride.

That we allow any marriage of children dates back to 1929, when the minimum legal marriageable age was set at 16 with parental consent or at the age of majority without it (at the time this was 21; since 1969 it has been 18). There is, therefore, a two-year window where parental discretion determines whether or not the marriage takes place of someone who is still legally a child. It is a questionable enough policy in the hands of the most benign of parents but scandalously open to abuse by the less kindly.

Were we to outlaw any marriage until 18, the age of adult status in all other matters, the benefits of that status would provide so much more of a fighting chance. Forced marriage might yet be attempted above that age, but the arsenal available to the dissenter would include, de facto, two years of extra maturity and, in all likelihood, extra education. There is the chance of immediate escape to college or university, with corresponding funding, and for the less academic the State kicks in: until that age, if you want independence from your family, you have to prove hardship — for example being estranged or in moral or physical danger which, again, involves dobbing in your parents.

At 18, however, you can register for job seekers’ allowance, you become eligible for housing benefit, council tax benefit and other premiums, without need to explain yourself. In other words, at 17 you might find it hard to resist persuasion to marry; at 18 you are incomparably better equipped to say, no, sod that, I’m off.

As for girls who marry abroad: if the minimum age for marriage in Britain were 18, it should be sensibly possible for us not to recognise the union of anybody married elsewhere below that age, in much the way that we do not recognise 13-year-old “wives” from Iran or their 15-year-old “married” sisters from Mississippi. It is already the case that a girl may not bring a foreign husband to live in the UK until she is 18; this is a recent step in the right direction that could only be improved upon should the marriage itself not be recognised if it took place below that age.

If you want to discuss the age of sexual consent, which of course you do, there is no earthly reason why it need correlate to the age of marital consent as, at the moment, it almost coincidentally does. It does not in much of the rest of the world, including Canada, Germany and most of the US, and they seem perfectly able to live with the difference.

We do not know how many of our 1,000 wedded under-18s (almost all girls, fancy that) come from minority backgrounds; marriage statistics are not available by ethnic breakdown. But if the raising of the age of marital consent would help brown girls, so it would also help pink ones. Indeed, when it comes to Caucasian parents, without the pressures of custom or tradition, don’t you even more think, good grief, what are they doing having their daughters marry so young? So she wants to, so what? Let her wait. Tell her she can’t always get what she wants — but if she tries, sometimes, she just might find, she’ll get what she needs.

So she’s pregnant, so what? This isn’t 1929; it is hard to believe that even the strictest of parents in 2005 can expect the penalty for an ill-advised quickie at 16 to be a sentence of inappropriate marriage. Moreover, shotgun weddings died out for the pragmatic reason that they didn’t work; the girl who found herself “having” to get married was the girl who later found herself “having” to get divorced and the most optimistic of relationship counsellors will now advise against a youthful wedding.

Nevertheless, as long as there are parents who — whether through misjudgment, neglect, exploitation or “culture” — will abuse their power over that two-year, 16 to 18 window in their children’s lives, there is also reason for the State to remove that power.

After all, a girl of 17 is not considered mature enough to vote, to order a pint of beer or to enter into any legally binding contract. So she finds herself in the position where she cannot buy a washing machine on the never-never, but with Daddy’s say-so she can sign the papers that commit her to a marriage intended to last for the rest of her life. How absurd is that?

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