It is not part of anyone's culture to be abused

Twice, in the weeks before she was murdered by her father, Tulay Goren told the police that she feared for her life. And twice she was ignored. Mehmet Goren, who was convicted of murder yesterday, killed his 15-year-old daughter because she had fallen in love with an "unsuitable" older man. To Mehmet, the affair made her a "worthless commodity" who could not be married off for a £5,000 dowry. The authorities did nothing to protect her, even though the police became involved when her father attacked her boyfriend, and even though Mehmet demanded in front of police officers that his daughter take a virginity test. Only a decade after her murder in 1999 has justice been done.

"Honour killings" in Britain? Impossible. To many people the case of Tulay Goren will come as a shock, but not to me. I know from personal experience, and from working with victims, that such "honour" crimes are a huge social problem in this country. The shame is not just that it is happening on such a large scale, but that it is so often covered up for fear of upsetting cultural sensibilities. Serious crimes are being treated as a matter for diversity officers rather than for the police and the courts.

There are measures in place to help potential victims of honour crimes, but they are not being used to anything like the extent that they should be. In 2007 Parliament passed the Forced Marriage Act, which enables magistrates to issue protection orders to stop women and girls being married against their will. If necessary, victims, a third of whom are under 16, can be taken into care. Passports can be confiscated, and parents can be forced to reveal the whereabouts of daughters who have gone missing from school, most likely because they have been taken abroad to be coerced into marriage. According to a recent Home Affairs Select Committee report, 2,500 British girls have gone missing from schools and are believed to be at risk.

But the law will have been in vain if authorities refuse to use it for fear of being accused of being racist. Up until last month, 86 forced marriage protection orders have been issued, yet not one of them was in Bradford, Leicester or Tower Hamlets. Is this because forced marriage is not a problem in those areas, all of which have some of the largest Asian populations in Britain? Or is it because authorities there are failing to use the powers for fear of creating offence? I am afraid it is the latter.

Two years ago Cleveland Police set up a helpline for victims of forced marriage. In that time it has received more than 300 calls. If that is the scale of the problem in an area where only 3 per cent of people are from ethnic minorities, imagine how many calls police in areas with large Asian populations would get if they became more proactive.

If a white child went missing from school or rang a helpline to complain that she was being taken away to be married, you can be sure it would be followed up. But I have seen at close quarters what happens when the child is Asian. Many schools and social service departments decline to act. Recently, I tried to get posters put up in schools around Derby, but the headteachers refused on the grounds that they didn't want to upset the local communities. A lot of people still consider forced marriage to be part of Asian culture and that it is offensive to intervene. But it is not part of anyone's culture to be abused.

Since the Government set up its forced marriage unit in 2005, 400 victims of forced marriages have been repatriated from abroad. One third of them were minors. But we are still only scratching the surface because people are very unwilling to face up to these "honour" crimes. Consider this: Tulay's mother took ten years to report her daughter's killing. And I know only too well the guilt and shame that prevents victims of "honour" crimes talking about what has happened to them.

In 1981, aged 15½, I was taken out of my school in Derby and told by my parents that seven years earlier I had been promised in marriage to a man from Punjab. They showed me a photograph of him. They had not even met him themselves, but they wanted me to marry him because they knew it would give them great status to be able to get this man into Britain and gain him citizenship.

When I refused to go through with the marriage I was locked in a room. My mother told me: "unless you marry who we say, you are dead in our eyes". Unknown to my parents I had a boyfriend, and I ran away with him to Newcastle where we slept in a car and washed in public toilets before we managed to find a bedsit.

I spent seven years in hiding and it was only when I heard that my 24-year-old sister Robina had set fire to herself rather than suffer the shame of leaving a violent arranged marriage, and had died as a result, that I returned to Derby to campaign against forced marriage. Even now my brother and surviving sisters will cross the road rather than talk to me.

I was lucky compared with many victims. When I was on the run in Newcastle I told my story to a policeman who agreed not to send me back home. Unfortunately, the police often fail to believe girls who tell them they are in danger; they are treated like stroppy teenagers who have fallen out with their parents. Tulay Goren begged to be put into a children's home. If she had been listened to she would be alive now.

Over the past 20 years attitudes towards domestic violence among the white population have changed immeasurably. No longer do police say "it's just a domestic" when they receive a call from a woman who is being attacked by her husband. Sadly, different standards still apply to violence among Asians. While it is too late for Tulay Goren, I hope that the story of her appalling and avoidable death will finally wake us up to the abuse taking place in our midst and that we will stop trying to excuse forced marriage as just a price to pay for multicultural diversity.

Jasvinder Sanghera is founder of Karma Nirvana, a charity that helps people to overcome cultural and language barriers.