Thousands of women – and men – every year are kidnapped, drugged, raped and forced into marriage against their will.

Julia Breen speaks to Jasvinder Sanghera, founder of charity Karma Nirvana, whose latest book, Daughters of Shame, highlights dozens of shocking true stories.

EACH morning, Jasvinder Sanghera is supposed to check under her car for bombs. She was given a device by police – which she describes as being “a long stick with a mirror on the end” – to check for any suspicious devices.

But she says: “I’ve been trained to do this every morning, but when you are a normal mum of two, trying to rush out in the mornings and get your kids to school, it is a bit strange.

“Being given the device came about as a result of a threat, but for me I can’t think about it. I can’t live being constantly in fear because it would consume you.”

Jasvinder is loathed and feared in equal measure by parts of the Asian community. For she is breaking the veil of secrecy which surrounds the thorny issue of forced marriage.

Each year, it is estimated that thousands of people are forced into marriages against their will, under threat of death, or shaming their family. Many of these are in the North-East.

The Choice helpline, set up by officers at Cleveland Police, with the help of Jasvinder’s charity Karma Nirvana, uncovered a wider problem than anyone believed possible. It took almost 300 calls in its first year, and is dealing with 56 active cases as a result. The helpline has been so successful that it was rolled out across the North-East in November.

By April, Jasvinder hopes to have opened the first satellite office of Derby-based Karma Nirvana in Newcastle. And she is launching her new book, Daughters of Shame, in the city at the end of this month.

She says: “We have seen many more people reporting forced marriage incidents in the North-East.

“In March, we are organising an event with the Government Office for the North-East to speak to all the people in education about the issue of Asian girls going missing from the school rolls.

“We have a large Bangladeshi community in the North-East, and in that community we see a higher prevalence of young, under-age, people being taken out of school and abroad for forced marriages, and we need to be working with schools to be able to spot these missing girls and bring them back to the UK.”

One of the stories Jasvinder features in her book is that of Bal Kaur Howard, from Darlington, who at 17 was forced to marry a man she barely knew, and was repeatedly raped and controlled throughout her marriage, before she managed to plot her escape eight years later.

Jasvinder considers herself lucky compared to those she features in her book. Her first book, Shame, told her own story, of how she ran away from her Midlands home aged 16 to Newcastle to avoid a forced marriage. She was disowned by all her family – being told “you are dead in our eyes” – but secretly kept in touch with her sister Robina.

Jasvinder later set up Karma Nirvana after Robina killed herself by setting herself on fire, seeing suicide as the only way of escaping her own forced marriage.

Honour is central to many Asian families, and wayward daughters find themselves at best disowned, and at worst, tracked down by bounty hunters and killed.

Jasvinder says: “The women I have met through the book, the majority have been kidnapped, raped, had guns held to their head, all that horrific stuff.

“There are real issues of criminal activity here in the UK that we are not hearing about. The stories in my book go into detail about what happened to these women. We read about a woman going to the police, only for an Asian police officer to breach her confidentiality and return her to her family, where she was in real danger.”

The recent case of Humayra Abedin – the 33- year-old doctor who was tricked into travelling home to Bangladesh before being drugged and forced to marry a Muslim man she hardly knew – highlighted the issue.

But Jasvinder insists this is just one of many identical stories. “She was rescued by the Government’s forced marriage unit and repatriated, but they do the same for 400 British subjects every year. Of those, 30 per cent are children.

“What is very serious, even with the cases in my book, is that she gave a statement in which she was clear that she was sedated and kidnapped, but she said ‘I don’t want to criminalise my parents, I love them’.

“I equate this attitude to the same as before we had domestic violence legislation, where people said they didn’t want to get their partners into trouble because we love them. Society then made the crime unacceptable, which empowered the victims.”

What Jasvinder is clear about is how hard it is for victims to come forward. After her first book, Shame, calls to the Karma Nirvana helpline trebled, and she is hoping the new book will have the same effect.

“People pretend it (forced marriage) doesn’t exist,” she says. “But it’s a huge problem.

“And it’s not just the Asian community’s problem – it’s the whole of society’s. It is often non- Asians, a police officer, or a teacher, who should be able to spot there is a problem.

“Over 200 Asian girls in Bradford went missing off the school rolls in one year – and no one batted an eyelid, because they think it is part of the culture to go abroad and get married.”

Jasvinder has a lot of work to do to make inroads into the Asian community, and encourage more reporting of crimes. But she isn’t giving up – and she never underestimates how hard it is for the people involved.

She adds: “One thing I have in common with all the people in my book is that we have been disowned by our families. It is like me asking you to wake up tomorrow morning and ask you never to see your mother, father, brother, sister or family home ever again.

“You have to live with being disowned, knowing that if you give birth your mother won’t share in that, and if you get married not one member of your family will come to the wedding.”

■ Anyone concerned about a friend or family member, or who needs to escape a forced marriage or threats themselves, can contact the Choice helpline on 0800-5999365. Karma Nirvana’s helpline, manned by volunteers, is 0800-5999-247.

■ Daughters of Shame, published by Hodder, is out on January 8.