Shazia Qayum remembers well the day her schoolfriends came knocking on her parents’ door, asking where she was. “I had to listen from the next room as my mum and dad told them quite clearly I had gone to Pakistan,” she said.

At 15 she had been about to sit her GCSEs when her parents removed her from school as punishment for refusing an arranged marriage.

“It was isolating and alienating. I felt invisible,” she said. “I simply felt that no one cared about me.”

Ms Qayum was tricked into travelling to Pakistan, where she was forced to marry a younger boy. She escaped at 17, and is now divorced. She has not spoken to her parents, or five siblings, for ten years.

Now 28 she works as a team leader for Karma Nirvana, a charity in Derby that supports victims of forced marriage and “honour” violence. She said that she was astounded that the alarm was only just being raised.

“I’m very, very surprised. What if it was white children who started going missing? Just think of Madeleine McCann and her profile, yet all these schoolgirls are disappearing and no one is counting,” she said.

“We cannot afford not to investigate this because of political correctness.”

She said that the local education authorities could no longer ignore the silent scream of a generation of schoolgirls. “I believe that there could easily be hundreds of girls out there [in my position],” she said.

“Teachers cannot afford to take at face value the explanations that girls have gone to Pakistan, Bangladesh, or any South Asian country . . . These cases need to be followed up.

“This isn’t about culture. This is about human rights. It is about child protection.”

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