London, May 27, 2005
Ashok Gupta
NRI press
NRI, Jasvinder Sanghera ran away from home at the
age of 15 to avoid a forced marriage to a person she
had never met. She lived in cars and bedsits after
hiding for eight years for fear of reprisals from
her Sikh family.
She returned to her home town of Derby at the age
of 24, where she put herself through university and
started a women's project from the student lodgings
so that other girls did not have to go through forced
marriage culture.
Now she is 39 and an Asian affairs manager at the
Refuge domestic violence charity. She was last night
honoured at the Asian Women of Achievement awards
ceremony at the London Hilton on Park Lane.
A mother of three, Ms Sanghera was joint winner with
Sheetal Mehta, a former Microsoft executive who left
to launch a fund to help women around the world with
a charity called Global Partners.
The awards were launched six years ago by Pinky Lilani
and Munir Samji to recognise all levels of achievement
by Asian women in Britain, including contributions
to the worlds of medicine, law, the public sector,
business and the arts.
She still receives threats from her family and her
young age experience left her with the ambition to
help other women.
Ms. Sanghera said, "I was brought up to believe
that to talk about your problems would be to shame
your family. That's what many Asian women still believe.
It is at the heart of the majority of Asian women's
experiences". After receiving the award at the
London Hilton on Thursday night, Sanghera said: "I
didn’t feel like a victim of forced marriage
after I ran away. I felt I had betrayed my family."
