One of the most touching aspects of the story of Humayra Abedin – the 33-year-old doctor with a Hindu boyfriend who was tricked into travelling home to Bangladesh, then imprisoned, drugged and forced to marry a Muslim man she hardly knew – was the statement she gave outside the High Court in London just before Christmas.

“I am deeply upset by what has occurred, but I do not wish my parents to suffer any punishment for what has happened,” said Abedin, who had just obtained an injunction to stop her parents removing her again. “I am their only child and they are still my parents.”

But what was once a happy family relationship is now sundered for ever. “That’s what makes resisting a forced marriage so difficult,” says Jasvinder Sanghera, author and human rights campaigner, who ran away from her home in the Midlands aged 16 to avoid being coerced into marrying a man her parents had chosen. “If you refuse your parents’ wishes, even though you know what they are doing is wrong, you end up feeling like the criminal. You are the bad daughter because you have shamed them.”

Izzat – honour – is central to many Asian families’ sense of self-worth. A key element is modesty and obedience in their daughters. Ever since she ran away, Sanghera, founder of Karma Nirvana, an advice centre in Derby that gives assistance to girls at risk of forced marriage, has felt the full force of her Sikh family’s disapproval. More than 25 years after she escaped through a window to run off with a boyfriend, her sisters cross the street when they see her.

The Abedin case is interesting, she says, “because it shows that this does not just happen to the 15-year-old daughters of ignorant farmers – professional, middle-class thirty-somethings are vulnerable, too.”

The number of headlines it generated is, for Sanghera, a sign that honour-based violence is finally being recognised as an outrage. “People talk about it being a cultural matter, but it is no part of my culture to be abused,” she says.

“In Britain men were once allowed to beat their wives, but as a society we came to see that domestic violence was wrong. I always felt that there would be a tipping point on the issue of forced marriage and honour-based violence, too, and I think we are finally reaching it.”

The coming year, she believes, will be a watershed in our understanding of the issue. Karma Nirvana is to open its first branch office in the northeast of England. Sanghera intends to set up what she calls her Honour Network across the country. Calls will be taken by women with personal experience of violence or separation from their families.

For years Sanghera was pretty much a lone voice. Now, however, she has a number of women led by Shazia Qayum (see Shazia’s story, right) prepared to go on record. Their first outing will be at the launch of Sanghera’s second book, Daughters of Shame, later this month.

Sanghera’s autobiography, Shame, published two years ago, became a bestseller because it so tellingly reflected the dilemmas of many teenage girls, born in liberal Britain but expected to follow suffocatingly strict Asian customs at home. “To my family I was wild, but I was just a teenager,” she says. “I wanted to perm my hair and have a paper round to earn some money.

“But my parents had come from a village in India and they wanted to continue that life. We were told white people were dirty, we weren’t allowed to have white friends. But I loved everything about the white girls at school. They had what I wanted – freedom.” After running off with Jassey, the boyfriend she later married and divorced, Sanghera spent several years in the north of England. But in the wake of her sister Robina’s horrifying suicide – in terror of the violent husband she had married to please her parents, she set herself on fire – Sanghera returned home to Derby and set up Karma Nirvana. It has since counselled hundreds of frightened Asian girls whose stories are told in Daughters of Shame.

It is not so very unusual for such cases to end in death: think of Banaz Mahmod, 20, raped and tortured by hitmen hired by her uncle after she left an arranged marriage to live with another man. Or Heshu Yones, 16, stabbed 11 times by her father after she was seen kissing her boyfriend, a Lebanese Christian.

“British people still find it difficult to accept that trivial offences – kissing a boy or truanting from school – can result in girls being beaten, imprisoned and terrorised,” says Sanghera, who has acted as an adviser to the government in setting up the Forced Marriage Act, a civil remedy designed to restrain families trying to coerce a girl into marriage, which came into force last year.

Progress is still frustratingly slow. The government’s Forced Marriage Unit helps about 400 girls every year – some as young as 11 – who have been bundled off to Bangladesh or Pakistan to be married. But when Sanghera tried to persuade schools in Bradford last year to display a government poster about forced marriage, every single one refused, citing “cultural sensitivities”.

Over the past few years, 300 teenage girls have disappeared from school rolls in Bradford alone.

“That’s a scandal, isn’t it?” says Sanghera. “When we started looking for them, some had moved house, some had moved school and some, yes, had married. But 33 remain totally unaccounted for. Imagine if 33 white girls had gone missing in one city – it wouldn’t need someone like me to raise the alarm.”

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