How do 2000 children go missing - and nobody does a damn thing!

It has been revealed today that over 2000 children are missing from school registers - permanently - and nobody knows where they are. They don't know WHERE they are but there is a justified fear of what has caused the absence. For most of these children are asian girls and it is strongly suspected that many have been taken out of school and sent abroad to be forcibly married.

Now this makes me hopping mad. Not that it happens, for sadly, I am all too aware of the cultural tradition in many asian communities of forcing their daughters to marry someone of the parents choice in this way. No I am hopping mad because I'm wondering why the UK educationalists, social services and police appear to have done absolutely nothing about it.



We have heard tales today from a young British asian girl who was taken out of school in this way, married off to an older man in Pakistan who then beat and raped her - though I'm sure he wouldn't have considered it rape as she was by then his 'property'. She said she was sure someone would save her once it was realised she was absent from school - but nobody did a damn thing.

Isn't this the country which has over the last few years instituted a policy of aggressive anti-truanting? Where police are sent to houses to discover where little Johnny has skived off to. Where moms are arrested and put in prison because their child persistently stays away from school? This was brought in amid a fanfare of trumpets and news reports of mothers being tearfully taken to prison.

I don't seem to recall that asian families in the UK were exempt from this legislation and that parents were allowed to take kids out of school without the same aggressive follow up to explain their absence.

So why have more than 2000, predominantly asian, children been allowed to disappear from British schools without anyone seeming to know why or doing anything to find out? Is this another of our wonderfully enlightened attitudes towards ethnic minorities, 'Lets not upset the applecart by making waves'? I simply cannot understand, given the new legislation and the trumpeted ballyhoo it got, how this situation has been allowed to happen!

A British asian businessman was on TV today talking about how it was a male responsibility to persuade the older generation that it was wrong to treat their daughters in this way - that they were not in the 'old country' and that they needed to revise their habits to conform to accepted British standards of doing things.

Well, heeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyy, THAT'S a novel idea. Are we sure it won't offend anybody?

In the meantime, while all this is being gently explained, there ought to be one absolute rule that applies to every family in the land regardless of culture or background. If one child goes missing from school, that absence should be investigated and if no satisfactory explanation of that kid's absence can be obtained , or the child produced, the parents should be arrested and the rest of the kids taken into care. As simple as that!