David Fickling
Tuesday August 29, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
A 12-year-old girl abducted from Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, could have been taken to Pakistan for an arranged marriage to a 25-year-old man, relatives said today.
Molly Campbell, also known as Misbah Iram Ahmed Rana, is believed to be with her father's relatives in either Lahore or Karachi after being taken from outside her school on Friday morning.
Her 18-year-old sister, Tahmina, is understood to have taken her to Stornoway airport to meet her father, Sajad Ahmed Rana. All three flew to Glasgow and then on to Pakistan.
Molly's grandmother, Violet Robertson, told the Daily Record newspaper that the girl's father had tried to abduct her before, and said he intended to marry her to a man in Pakistan.
"It's just terrible. Molly is only a little girl," she said. "It's an arranged marriage. She doesn't know the man. Molly doesn't want to go to Pakistan. She wants to stay with her mum."
Molly's 38-year-old mother, Louise Campbell, has legal custody of her. Ms Robertson said the pair had been living in Lewis after being driven from Glasgow and then the village of Drummore, in Dumfries and Galloway, by her father's attempts to get her back.
"He turned up outside her school a few months ago and tried to snatch her, but she managed to get away," Ms Robertson said. "Molly's mum has been running from Sajad for a long time now. He won't hand Molly back - never. I'm scared that's her gone for good."
Ms Campbell will appeal for her daughter's return at a press conference in Stornoway later today.
The couple met when Ms Campbell was 16 and Mr Rana was 23 and both were working at market stalls in Glasgow. They married in a Muslim ceremony in 1984, and Molly was the youngest of four children.
All four had initially stayed with Mr Rana after the marriage broke up before deciding to move back in with Ms Campbell after their father returned to Pakistan.
"For a while, everything was good and Louise was really happy," Ms Robertson said. "But it soon became clear that Sajad wouldn't rest until he had his family back in Pakistan with him.
"Last year, Adam and Tahmina [Molly's brothers] decided they wanted to go back to Pakistan to live, and Omar decided to get married and went off to live in London.
"But Sajad was furious that Molly was still in Scotland with Louise. He decided he wanted her back with him. Sajad has taken away my grandkids, and the whole family has lived in fear because of him."
Ms Robertson said Ms Campbell had changed Molly's schools in an attempt to prevent Mr Rana from tracking her down, as well as enrolling her under an assumed name and cutting off contact with relatives. She said Mr Rana had hired private investigators to track his daughter down.
Police described Molly as 5ft 4in tall, of medium build, with dark shoulder-length hair and a sallow complexion.
The case of Molly Campbell/Misbah Rana has thrown up several issues that are quite revealing:
ReplyDelete1. Any girl who wants to live with her Father must be making that choice under duress. The fact is that pretty much everyone (and especially institutions) believe that Mothers are the best nurterers, even to the point of ignoring blatant evidence to the contrary. Although I don't necesasarily think that the recently disbanded Fathers for Justice Protest group chose some of their tactics wisely, I can surely sympathise with their plight. The courts, social services and the media are all geared towards somehow elevating all mothers to the point of sainthood and stereotyping all fathers as monstrous, uncaring, exploitative, feckless and useless parents - especially where girls are concerned. Nobody questioned the fact that Misbah might want to live with her Father rather than her Mother and the press ( and include the Guardian dn the Indie as well as the Daily Mail in this) jumped to defend her mother without apparently checking anything the Mother said against any facts. I don't pretend to know the detail but it looks like the Mother might be the problem in this case. Anyone whom, after a divorce, rebrands their children by changin their names has probably got some problems in dealing with the aftermath of the divorce. Molly/Misbah's mother also appeared to me to be overdramatising the issue, behaving as if her daughter had been murdered in a pretty over the top way. It seemed false to me from the start. The press had their pictures of a weeping Mother and they stuck with that, pouring sympathy on her plight without question.
2. Almost immediately, and in spite of zero evidence, the suggestion was made that Molly/Misbah had been kidnapped and forced into marriage at age 12. It was almost a fantasy of prejudice. Of course, that's all Muslim Fathers do - wait until their daughters are 12 or so and then force them to marry someone by kidnapping them and tying them up if necessary. It is a hideous distortion of the truth of British Muslim family life. It may operate by some cultural rules that are hard to understand, but not one person interrupted the press hysteria to point out that the 'forced' marriage issue was merely a lazy and convenient assumption.
Of course, forced marriage does exist, as do the rather unfortunately named honour killings. Both are abhorrent. But they are few and far between. Without acces to reliable stats I am willing to bet that as many children of non-Muslim families are controlled and abused in their own way. In my teaching life I have encountered 3 young teenage girls whose prostitute Mothers were acting as their pimps - selling their own young daughters on the streets at 12 and 13. I don't see too many assumptions that all singlemothers with daughters are doing this.
Yet, we are in a climate where Muslims are evil. They are not allowed to have the same emotions or problems as the rest of us.
The medias' racism in this case also meant that they immediately sided with the 'normal white Mother. God forbid that the Father might actually be a decent guy. After all, he's a P*ki. Does not compute.
3. If someone wants to choose a life in 'third world' Muslim Pakisan over the wonderful time everyone has in the UK (especially those mixed race kids who have such a lovely time in the cosmopolitan and toally non-parochial Western Isles, then they must either be crazy or under duress. It's aspirational to want to move to Provence, but not Pakistan.And who would want to give up our wonderful Christian secularism for a religious upbringing. I mean, if you want ot become a nun then that's a bit weird but ultimately okay, but a Muslim.....?
4. Nobody of 12 years old is capable of making decision for themselves. The fact is, a mixed race kid who has clearly had to go through a difficult divorce and custody battle and maybe a forced religious conversion is just the kind of 12 year old who might at least know what they don't want.