Radhakrishnan PriyancaPRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. It is indeed a privilege to stand and take a call on this bill and it's actually quite an emotional one for me because a lot of the work that I did in the sector in the refuge movement—a large part of it at least—centred around the issue of forced marriage and it's one that personally I've been part of years of lobbying along with the Shakti Community Council the organisation that I worked for at the time. This is a bill that is reasonably simple. It makes quite a simple change to the Marriage Act but it has a long history it has a complicated past and it has an absolutely transformational future.At this point I want to thank the member Joanne Hayes whose name the bill is in and also Dr Jackie Blue whose name the bill was in formerly I understand. Of course as the Hon Mark Mitchell pointed out we had some very robust discussions at the select committee about this. We nutted out the various bits of the bill that we thought might potentially be problematic. I actually want to thank all the members of the Justice Committee for the part that they played in that process.This bill is about keeping minors safe. It may not impact the lives of a large number of 16- and 17-year-olds but for those that it will impact it will play a huge role in keeping them safe.So at this junction actually I just wanted to begin with an excerpt from a poem by a Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran On Children". He says: "Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.They come through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts for they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrowwhich you cannot visit not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like thembut seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday."That in essence in a sense is what this bill is about. So what does it do? I mentioned that it's reasonably simple in terms of what the bill does. Currently under the Marriage Act 1955 16- and 17-year-olds who want to get married have to get parental consent in order to be able to do so. This bill if it passes into law will change that and it will take away the requirement for parental consent and replace that with Family Court consent. So what that means is if you're a 16- or 17-year-old and you want to get married you go to the Family Court and get consent.That takes away the loophole in a sense because when we're talking about forced marriage with regard to 16- and 17-year-olds in most of the cases that I have seen and in most of the cases that front-line service agencies have seen it is the parents who force those children into marriage. The reasons are diverse and I'll go into that a little bit.My Master's thesis was on this topic—on the topic of forced marriage more broadly and it included underage marriage as well. So forced marriage sits squarely within the continuum of violence against women and it's often closely linked to honour-based violence. Forced marriage occurs for many reasons. Sometimes it's to do with immigration because if a young girl here is a New Zealand citizen then there are some cases—and I've worked with a case that falls into this space as well—that basically parents would try to get her married to someone from overseas because there was an immigration aspect to it and there was money involved as well.Sometimes parents are mortified when their children—especially their daughters who have been exposed to a different set of norms and practices here in New Zealand—want to say date or dress in certain ways that are considered unacceptable. In some of those cases and again not all—at this point I just want to make the point that we've got to be very careful that we don't tar entire communities with the same brush. This doesn't happen across ethnic communities and it's actually a human rights violation rather than an aspect of culture as it were. So in some of those cases that I mentioned girls are coerced into marriage to preserve a sense of honour as it were and that of their families. Sometimes it's actual forced marriage; sometimes it's threatened and that's used to control the sexual interest or behaviour or to protect perceived cultural or religious ideas and ideals of honour. A forced marriage is different from an arranged marriage because the concept of choice is not there. Duress is not confined to just physical coercion. Sometimes and oftentimes it's huge amounts of psychological and emotional coercion that are at play as well and that's actually very often much harder to detect than the physical coercion. Sometimes parents actually think that they're acting in the best interests of the child because that's the mind-set—and I don't want to go into too much detail because this is taking a little bit away from the bill but it is the context within which the bill sits. Sometimes that emotional and psychological coercion is not seen for what it is. It's seen as looking out and trying to protect the best interests of that child. I worked with a young woman who was dating someone who was from a different religious background to herself. The family didn't want that relationship to continue and didn't want that marriage to happen and in some of those cases forced marriage is then used to ensure that a marriage doesn't take place or that a relationship is broken. Now the issue of forced marriage is often positioned as cultural rather than a human rights issue yet in 2005 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe said "Forced marriages and child marriages constitute serious and recurrent violations of human rights and the rights of the child. It is an outrage that under the cloak of respect for the culture and traditions of certain communities there are authorities which tolerate forced marriages and child marriages although they violate the fundamental rights of each and every victim." The position that I adopted—and I continue to adopt throughout the work that I have done in this field—is that it is important not to succumb to cultural relativism by turning a blind eye to the issue of condoning it as a cultural or religious practice because it's really not. Forced marriage is practised in many societies around the world. It's not confined to specific cultures or religions. No major world religion condones the practice of forced marriage. Finally profiling it as such is actually detrimental to the women who are trying to get out of such practices because whole communities don't condone this practice. It's only an issue amongst those who choose to exert power and control over the women in their family and as the Hon Andrew Little pointed out this is actually a form of domestic violence. So this bill—we had I think it was close to 30 submitters on this bill. Eighty percent were in favour. As I mentioned before it's taken an incredibly long time—years of lobbying and advocacy from the sector—to get to this point. So I just want to thank everyone once again who has been involved in ensuring that this bill has reached where we're at today where I understand there's unanimous support across the House for it. We have worked well together. This will actually impact the lives of people and especially the 16- and 17-year-olds we're talking about who are more vulnerable who struggle just to survive and whose voices are often not heard in this House. So I thank everyone in the sector who's worked to ensure that those voices are heard and I thank everyone for supporting this bill. It's a great pleasure and a great privilege that I commend this bill to the House. Thank you. Debate interrupted.The House adjourned at 10 p.m."