It is a deeply disturbing claim by Ann Cryer MP that up to 300 Asian girls a year are removed from Bradford schools and flown to Pakistan for "forced" marriages. Her fellow MP Terry Rooney says he has heard a similar figure, although Education Bradford is unable to confirm or deny it.

Whether there are 300 or 30 or even three girls from Bradford being forced into marriage against their wishes - or coerced, because the dividing line between the two is fine - it is too many. As Sher Azam, president of the Bradford Council of Mosques, so rightly says, "Choosing who you marry is a basic human right of the individual, either male or female".

Making a girl as young as 12 leave her studies and then threatening or blackmailing her into marrying someone in Pakistan is a shameful denial of that human right. It is also a denial of that girl's right to fulfil her potential at a time when many Asian girls are doing well at school. Once they are taken out of the education system it must be virtually impossible for them to pick up the pieces later on.

It is time that all marriages except those which are entered into willingly and voluntarily by both parties (albeit, perhaps, after an introduction arranged by their families) were outlawed. An atmosphere needs to be created in which girls denied that freedom feel able to go to the authorities. If a change of law is needed to help to bring that about, then so be it.