The Girlfriends: Spotlight, E9: Jasvinder Redefines Honour

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Hi, listener.

In this episode, we mentioned some tough themes like domestic abuse, honor abuse, and suicide.

There's really no getting around it.

The woman whose story we're telling today has been on a rough ride.

I know that stuff can be really hard to listen to, but we also get to hear her thrive.

Among other things, she delightfully ends up as a double agent posing as a woman's fitness instructor.

Don't worry, it'll make sense later.

There's also some swearing.

I'm so sorry about that.

Jasvinda's family is big.

She has five sisters and a brother.

But Jasvinda grew close with one of her sisters in particular, Rubina.

We went to school together, we shared a bed together.

We We were close in age as well.

And I remember once when she became engaged before they took her to India, she ran away from home, we all thought.

Rubina was 15 and a half when her marriage was arranged by their parents.

Her mother and father were all looking for her everywhere, and nobody could find her.

And then our house back then, we used to have an outside toilet.

So I went round the back.

She was sitting in the outside toilet on the floor

and she was crying and I held her

and that was the first time ever she said to me I don't want to go to India and I said to her let's run away

and you know she just laughed and said we can't do that

Neither Rubina nor Jaspinda wanted to marry like this, but Rubina felt she had no choice.

She just said, it's what we do.

And I would say, you don't have to.

She goes, yes, yes, no, we have to do this.

Jasvinda, on the other hand, saw it differently.

I'd watched this happen to so many of my sisters, being taken to India to be married to strangers.

I didn't want that.

I was feeling this strong sense of that I'm not doing that.

I don't want that.

But I couldn't voice that.

Not yet, at least.

Jasfinda was part of a family in which this scenario had played itself out generation after generation.

Today on the show, the story of how Jasfinda challenged the way things had always been in her family and her community.

You don't say no to a marriage, that's dishonourable.

You don't integrate, that's dishonourable.

You don't educate yourself, that's dishonourable.

And how, in that process, she helped many thousands of other women and girls do the same thing.

I'm Anna Sinfield, and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Spotlight, where we tell stories of women winning.

Today, Jasvinda redefines honour.

I was wondering as a small girl, what was your understanding of what the future held for you?

What did you see ahead?

Well, I grew up within a family whereby my parents were from the Punjab, from India.

So they came to England in the late 1950s in search of work and they settled here.

They brought with them their belief, their value systems, their culture, their traditions.

So my upbringing was very much part of that dynamic.

And one of the things that I watched growing up was how women stood behind the men,

always worked quietly, silently, normally in the kitchen.

And the men laughed and joked, but the women were very quiet.

I remember

my father coming home with local men from the pub, Indian men that he knew, and our job was to quickly get out of the way, not be seeing all this cooking and stuff for them, and bringing the food in and serving them.

For me,

this was the role of women.

There was also another, much bleaker responsibility that Jasvinda's mum wanted to drill into her daughters.

You don't dishonour a family, we were told, by leaving an abusive partner.

Jasvinda says that when she was a child, it was very common for her to see women being abused by their husbands, both in the community and in her family.

As I'm watching this, I began to think, this is what happens.

You get married, you get hurt, and nobody comes to rescue you.

And the analogy my mother used to use was, you have to think of an abusive man as a pan of milk.

It boils to the top, and your role as a woman is to blow on it to calm it down.

And that was a consistent message that I heard from the age of 11 years old.

That

is a tough one to hear growing up.

Did you talk to your sisters about how they felt?

Well, this is the thing.

My sisters just accepted it.

There was no challenge.

I learned from a very very young age that I have the power as a female to bring dishonour to my family or honour to my family through how I behaved.

The honour of my family was invested in my sexuality as well.

So my family raised me to understand what the rules of engagement were.

This is honourable, this isn't honourable.

If you do this, shame.

Shame on you, shame on the family.

Now,

if we cross the line and we bring shame to the family, you're going to be punished.

I could be harbed.

I could be forced into a marriage.

And this is why, in the extreme cases,

women can be murdered by their families for bringing shame on the families.

Wow.

Wow.

And the bar is so low.

Tell me a little bit more about your parents' specific kind of roles within your family dynamic.

What about your mum?

So my mother came from India and didn't speak a word of English.

As the women did, they followed the men.

So the men came first, they settled, got somewhere to live, and then the women joined them.

So mum came over here, very fearful of Britain.

You know, she lived in a rural village in India.

She was scared of hospitals.

She'd never seen a white person before or anybody other than her colour.

You know, it was very frightening for her.

So she lands here, very isolated, and then the other people that look like her, women, become her friends because she can communicate with them in the language, share the food, etc.

And then she gives birth to daughters, not sons.

We were always taught, and this is still the case,

that it's such a shame to give birth to a daughter.

Everybody wants a boy.

You know, the boy passes on the family name.

And so for my mother, she would have carried that weight.

She cooked.

She was very quiet.

Rarely did I ever see my mother smile.

But she was, for us, the disciplinarian.

So she was the one that made sure that we as girls behaved according to a system.

And if we crossed that line, my mother would be the one that would punish us.

you know she would say to me well i was married you know when i was 15 why are you any different yeah so she was carrying on what she knew otherwise she wouldn't have had the acceptance of the community what was school life like for you then i imagine that you went to a school that was mixed culturally what was that like I mean, I absolutely love school.

I really did enjoy school.

The Asian girls like me, the Indian girls like me, were all like me.

They behaved like me, very quiet, very subdued.

And I was really attracted to the other girls who were westernised, who were expressive.

And I really craved that world

where you could just be without somebody telling you that it was wrong.

At school, or whenever she was allowed out into town, Jasvinda would look around her and see women expressing themselves.

I mean, it was the early 80s.

Shoulder pads ruled the world.

Bold makeup and clashing patterns marked you as a fun girly.

And then there were perms.

All the popular girls at school had a perm.

And naturally, Jasvinda also wanted some of that chemically treated cool.

I went to the hairdressers

and I wanted a perm and I...

Sat in this chair and I said to this hairdresser, saved up this money, I want a perm.

And I watched as she chopped all my long hair off right up to my shoulders.

And I had this perm without thinking about the consequences.

Do you think you were going to get away with that?

The freedom of

wanting to do this, wanting to be like other people that were free.

Yeah.

And I went home and thinking, oh shit, mum's going to see this.

And the worst thing you can do is cut your hair because you're trying to be westernized.

I remember my younger sister saying to me, You're going to get killed.

And I was 15 years old at the time.

That consequence seemed so far away.

And so, what I did was for three days, I'd put a towel on my head.

When my mum came home, it was about five o'clock, and then I'd say, I'll just have a shower.

So, I did that for three days and pretended I had a shower until one day she knocked the towel off my head.

Oh my word, she freaked out when she saw my hair.

She was screaming and shouting, shouting.

And she sent me away to London to go and live with my sister until my hair grew back.

And my sister would oil my hair every day to drop these curls, to drop these curls.

And then only when my hair had grown back and I begged to go back home, they allowed me to go back.

My goodness, did your sister not get it?

No.

No, my sisters were very much

part of that system.

The thing about a system is it only continues if you allow it to, you enable it, and you become part of that.

So, they became the enforcers of it.

It often felt to Jasfinda like she was the only one who ever swam against the current in her family.

But she would notice that sometimes her dad couldn't resist going against her mum's wishes either.

You know, he smoked and you had a crafted cigarette when mum wasn't watching.

And, you know, he went to the pub at the end of his day.

And he did all the things, but in a way, he did them hidden from my mum as well yeah

but my dad gave me this sense of

it's okay to be different and that's what I really struggled with because all this was happening to my sisters and dad was quiet he didn't say anything but you could see it in his face he was troubled then when Jasvinda was 14 Her mother finally sat her down to break the news Jasvinda had always known was coming.

I came home from school one day joyfully, skipping home from school, etc.

And

I walk in and my mother comes home from work and she sits me down, very jovial, and she presents me with a photograph of this man who she tells me is going to be my husband.

And I remember looking at this photograph and thinking,

he's shorter than me.

You know, as a 14-year-old kid, he's older than me.

I don't want to marry a stranger.

Nobody ever challenged my mother

but i dared to say it

i'm not marrying a stranger i want to go to school mum didn't think anything of it she just laughed and smiled she said i'm going to put it on the mantelpiece keep on looking at it you'll grow to like him she left it on the mantelpiece and i just carried on as normal and it was only when

it became serious almost 15 years old when my mother was saying right now

the relatives of this person is coming to see you.

We've got to be thinking about the dress, we've got to be thinking about these things.

That's when it became really, really real to me.

And that's when the rebel in me was coming out.

And I know that girls normally disappear when they're 15 or 16.

And I'm getting closer to that age now.

Girls from the community would be taken away from school without any notice and sent to India to get married.

Jasvinda says that these marriages were arranged with Indian men, family relations or friends who wanted to move to the UK for a better life.

So once a girl was sent away, she would begin married life overseas and then she'd return with her often much older husband.

What seems most shocking to me is that often this raised no eyebrows with any authorities.

Jasvinda knew that she was set to disappear like this too, but then, as they do, a boy came onto the scene.

My mother almost allowed me to have a little bit more freedom because what she was trying to do was sweeten me up in order to marry this man.

So that meant I could go to my Indian girlfriend's house.

I could even go out with her if I wanted to.

And her brother started to look at me, smile at me, we started talking.

And I started to tell him what was happening to me.

So I started to date her brother and see him in secret.

And we got to know each other.

And he was the first boy I ever kissed.

And he said he would help me to leave.

And for me, that was a way out.

But the thing here is, my mother found out about him.

And that was when my parents took me out of education and locked me in a room with a padlock on the outside of the door because they found out about this boy.

That is so shameful.

Jasfinda stayed locked in her room like a princess in a tower, for several days.

It felt like an eternity.

Jasvinda knew that there was a boy eager to help her run away.

His name was Jassy.

But he couldn't do anything if she stayed trapped in her room.

Her chance at freedom was slipping away.

Then she had an idea.

Okay, I'll tell my mother I will marry this man.

Because if I tell her that,

then the front door will open and then I can plan my escape.

She was elated.

I was allowed out the bedroom.

All the plans were being made.

The dress, the gown, the people come to see the bride.

And I had to pretend that I was part of this facade that is going on, but smiling in all the right places.

But what it gave me was a little bit of freedom to plan my escape.

Wow.

And then when did you finally make your escape?

It was when I turned 16, when I heard my mother on the phone planning tickets to go to India and my name was given on the ticket as well.

I knew it was imminent.

I knew they're going to take me now.

So that was when I thought I have to go now.

Every day the pattern was my father worked a night shift.

He'll sleep all day.

My mother would leave the house.

My sister would go to school, but I was the one at home.

And on this particular day, I wrote a note for my mother and father, told told them how much I loved them, left it in the bedroom.

I didn't take anything with me apart from about two photographs.

And I just ran out the front door, literally ran and ran and ran as fast as I could.

And I ran to where the boyfriend works.

I ran to him.

I said, we have to leave and we have to leave now.

It sounds very Romeo and Juliet because he opened the map, where should we go?

And I said, I don't know.

He says, close your eyes.

Wherever your finger lands, we'll go there.

And it landed on Newcastle.

Newcastle.

It was as good a candidate for her and Jassy's Hollywood-style getaway as any other.

And crucially, it was 162 miles away from Jaspinda's home in Derby.

I was trying to give my parents the message, I don't want to marry a stranger.

And I thought, this will be the thing that makes them see.

me running away from home.

My parents reported me missing to the police.

Police did find me.

I begged this police officer as a 16-year-old girl not to send me home because they're going to marry me off to this stranger.

And I'm begging him and he says, okay, I won't send you home, but you need to ring home.

And my mother answered the phone and I said, it's me.

She starts screaming down the phone and I say, Mum, I want to come home,

but I won't marry that that man I want to go to school I want to go to college and she just responded with you either come home and marry who we say

or from this day forward you are dead in our eyes I hope you give birth to a daughter who does to you what you have done to me then you will know what it feels like to raise a prostitute

And I said to my mother, mum, I'm only just 16.

I don't want to marry a stranger.

Please, I want to come home.

She says, you're dead in our eyes from this day forward.

I was in a red payphone and I slipped down the phone box on the floor, my head in my hands.

And Jesse was saying, It's okay.

And I said, Is it okay?

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Jasfinda had escaped from home with only the clothes she was wearing.

Her family had disowned her, and she was all alone in a strange city with just her boyfriend Jassy.

She was desperate to find some sort of stability in her life, a home base.

So she ended up moving in with Jassy and his family.

Jesse was a little bit older than me, and he didn't take advantage of my vulnerability.

He was kind, he looked after me.

And I just felt, I might as well get married now.

I might as well marry him.

So you married the boyfriend who helped you escape?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I was 16.

And then I fell into a space of thinking,

well, if I marry him, my family might accept me.

And if I educate myself and get a degree, they might accept me.

I started to do things in the hope that my family would see me as a person of worth and they may accept me.

But they never did because

the worst thing for my mother was the fact that this man was from a lower caste.

A caste basically means social class in Indian culture.

Not only have you run away from home and shamed this family, you ran away with somebody from the lowest of the low.

Then, when Jasfinda was 19 she and Jassy had a daughter together but after a few years they realized their relationship just wasn't working.

It wasn't never gonna last because look

would we say to any young person today who'd never kissed a boy into a 15 and a half get married when you're 18.

I mean seriously.

Yeah.

You had a lot of catching up to do in your early 20s.

It makes sense that, you know, the wheels came off at points.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I was coping with the sheer absence.

And my coping mechanism was, I remember being a market trader at the time, and I would take a hip flask with me and I would have my whiskey on the market stall, drink it in the afternoon.

And I was numbing myself through painkillers.

I was addicted to painkillers for a whole year.

You know, I can look back now and I get it, but at that time, that numbing is that numbing of those feelings.

You are not wanting to feel.

It was around this time that Jasvenda got some awful news.

One day, this woman came to my market store and she said, you need to ring home because something has happened to your sister.

But she wouldn't tell me what.

So I ran to a payphone.

My mother answered the phone and I said, What's the matter?

What's happened, mum?

And my mother said, It's Rubina.

She's died.

And I said, how?

How has she died, mum?

I saw saw her, you know, just recently.

You know, she's my sister.

What do you mean, dead?

And she said,

she's set herself on fire and she's committed suicide.

Jasfinda hadn't been in close touch with Rubina for years.

It all went back to what happened when Rubina was forced to marry.

Things had changed between them.

Rubina had changed.

She was always competitive.

She was almost six foot tall.

She could sew, she could do karate.

I remember Charlie's, we used to watch Charlie's Angels and she used to do all these karate kicks and all sorts of things.

And one day she'd put a hand through a window and smashed it accidentally.

And we laughed and laughed and laughed, knowing we were going to get into trouble, but we didn't care.

I looked up to her.

And then when she disappeared from school at 15 and a half,

The absence of her was just immense for me because she's no longer at school and she's gone.

and I didn't want her to go off and get married.

I still wanted her to be my sister playing and laughing and you know going to school together.

But now she's getting married and she had missed almost nine months of her education.

And when she came back from India,

she was now somebody's wife and I didn't recognise her because she looked different.

She had a wedding ring on her finger.

She wasn't wearing Western dress.

She was wearing traditional dress.

And she became really serious.

So she didn't mess around anymore.

And she was different.

But then she still had to go back to school.

And

the school never asked where she'd been for almost a year.

And then she just disappeared.

Rubina moved away again, but this time to Germany to start a new life with her husband there.

It was a sort of stopgap before they were meant to return to England.

I missed her immensely.

And she missed me.

And back in those days, we'd write to each other.

But then I was going through what I was going through, and she wasn't there.

And I ran away, and that was it.

We never picked up.

Rubina ended up in Canada.

And from what Rubina told her, Jasfinda believed the marriage was abusive.

After some time, Rubina left her husband.

She came back to England with an eight-week-old baby, and my mother accepted her back.

and slowly we began to talk in secret being her did.

Rubina told Jasvinda she'd met someone new.

Their mother accepted the new relationship but with one big caveat.

She said to Rubina, you've made your bed.

If anything goes wrong in this marriage it's up to you to make it work.

But Jasvinda soon became worried about Rubina again.

and so she decided to visit her.

Rubina and her second husband lived in Leicester, a city in the Midlands of England.

Jasvinda took the bus there, and when the bus pulled into the station, Rubina was already waiting for her.

I hugged her and she went, ah, and I'm like, what's the matter?

It's because all her body was bruised.

Hugging her was hard.

And when I went to the house, I could see all the physical signs,

you know, broken windows, things around the house.

And I begged her, I said, please come with me.

I'll protect you.

And she said, I can't, because I have to think about mum and dad and what people think.

So she's putting this before her own life and independence and safety.

This was the last time Jasvinda ever saw her sister.

She later learnt more details about Rubina's death.

Allegedly, Rubina had told her husband that she wanted to end her life, but he disregarded it.

He said he didn't think she'd really do anything.

I believe she was in such pain.

She wanted somebody to listen and hear.

Well, I think a lot of what suicide prevention charities say is that it very rarely is that somebody really truly wants to end their life.

What they want to end is the life they're living right now, the moment they're in.

And it sounds like your sister tried to break out of that life many times and it just seemed like the world was pushing her back towards it.

The family and community were pushing her back towards it because

she went to them for help and they sent her back because of honour.

It's dishonourable to leave an abusive partner.

Jaswinda says these were her family's attitudes even after Rubina's death.

She heard them say things along these lines at her funeral.

That was a turning point for me in my life because I thought, why are you putting your life on hold, waiting for this family to accept you,

hoping that they will give you something to make you feel wanted?

This is wrong.

And then I let go

and I accepted that I was the victim, not the perpetrator, finally.

And I established a charity that is Karma Nirvana that you know, was in Rubina's name,

a charity that was going to to speak out about forced marriages happening in England, child marriages, these abusive crimes, and I wanted to give voice to it.

Jasvinda didn't see anyone else talking about this stuff.

She says she tried speaking to doctors, health agencies, and the police about forced marriage and honour abuse.

She wanted help to start tackling it, but no one she talked to believed it was a widespread problem.

Everybody is telling me this doesn't happen in England.

Show me the the statistics, Jasvinda.

So I'm saying I am a statistic.

Rubina is a statistic.

Two people is enough for me.

But I couldn't prove it that it was happening.

Jasvinda had it up to here being told that she was imagining this problem.

She was going to do something about it herself.

And what she did was set up that charity called Karma Nirvana, which means peace and enlightenment.

The idea was that women could call Jasvinda and ask for help if they were stuck in in a situation like hers or Rubina's.

The phone is in my front room.

You know, I'm a single mum.

I'm raising my children and I'm waiting for this phone to ring.

But it wasn't ringing.

Days and weeks went by as Jasvinda willed the phone to come to life.

Then it was months, which turned into years.

The only way I could get people to know I'm here was to find a way to keep on talking about it out there in the community to put out flyers to be a Keep Fit instructor.

I'd go to Indian Community Centre, Pakistani Community Centers, doing a Keep Fit class for women.

But at the end of the class, I would say, This is me.

I was forced into a marriage.

There's a charity now that can help you.

And I kept on doing it and doing it and to find ways in.

Oh, that's so clever.

And then hope for the phone to ring.

Then, finally, after around four years, Jasvinda's Jane Fonda-style guerrilla warfare paid off.

The phone rang.

And I'm taking the call, trying to be really serious and everything.

As soon as the phone goes down, I'm jumping up and down the room, jumping up and down with the kids.

And the kids are thinking, what is she doing?

Mom, what's happened?

What's happened?

You know,

you can't really explain to them what has happened.

And then it gives me that energy.

There's going to be another one.

There's going to be another one.

And in a month, we have two calls, and like I'm celebrating two calls.

Can you imagine how I feel when there's like 10?

Imagine how it feels when there's a hundred calls.

There were hundreds.

And then there were thousands.

After the break, Jasvinda takes Karma Nirvana to the next level.

With every year that passed, more and more women and girls called Karma Nirvana.

The organization grew exponentially.

After a while, it wasn't just Jasfinda in her front room anymore.

There were volunteers, and then half a dozen paid workers.

What Jasvinda had felt in her bones turned out to be true.

There were so many women out there in her position.

In 2018, Jasvinda decided to step back from running Karma Nirvana.

By that point, the charity had reached staggering numbers.

We'd helped over 185,000 women called the helpline.

Wow.

You know, so, and men.

Because I'd started to recognise that men were also affected, predominantly gay men who had been forced into marriages to hide their sexuality.

So the charity today supports men and women and they deal with over a thousand calls a month currently and it's still underreported.

Schools are not talking about it.

Homeschooling has gone up through the roof here in the UK.

Imagine what's going on behind those closed doors.

Jasfinda has now handed the running of Karma Nirvana over to her daughter, Natasha.

But she'll always be proud of what she started, inspired by her sister Rubina.

The feeling is of

Rubina, your death is not in vain.

Rubina, you're still with us.

You know, we all leave this planet in the end.

And those that go in that way, remembering them is important.

Being able to do something in their name is magnificent.

And, you know, I would talk about her all the time.

So she never left me.

And she's not leaving your minds either.

You know, I've introduced you to her.

She's still alive in your memory now.

Yeah, and that's proper honour, isn't it?

Indeed.

Yeah, absolutely.

I know that there's a couple examples of some of the girls that you helped.

Would you be able to tell me some of those stories?

Gosh, there are so many stories.

And one of them was there was a young woman, and by this time, I had developed relationships with the police and all sorts of organizations.

My mobile rang, and it was very early in the morning.

And it was a girl, and she said, I need your help, I need your help, I need your help.

I've got an opportunity, I need to go, I need to go now.

She's in a room, there's bars on the window, this is in London, and they've not locked the front door this time.

I can go, but I'm scared.

So I talked her through the whole thing.

Describe where you are, coming down the stairs.

She goes out, she opens the front door and she goes, fucking hell.

And I said, what's the matter?

What's the matter?

She goes, the light, the light.

Oh, my word.

She wasn't used to light because she'd been kept in this room.

She was struggling to walk because she'd been in this room.

She hadn't moved her legs as much.

She was wobbling and she was nervous.

So she was shaking.

She sat somewhere.

She described where she was.

Stay on the phone.

I said, and there's another phone i'm going to call the police and they're going to come and get you a police officer picked the girl up sometime later just vinder met up with her and drove her to a refuge and i said to her how did you find the helpline and she went fuck me oh no and she was this really cockney young girl and she goes marry claire I read on the back page a whole article about you.

It's under my bed.

And I said, it's okay.

you know, you're here, now you're safe, that's okay.

Anyway, she's in the refuge, and that was when I started to get phone calls from her family saying, You've got our daughter, we know what you do, we're coming to get you, we know where you live.

And then, death threats started to happen.

I had a threat, there was a bomb under my car,

and the threats didn't stop.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, with this young girl, almost 18 months have passed.

And one day she just said, can we meet up for a coffee?

And I said, yeah, sure.

I'll meet you at the trade station.

And she came.

And I'm looking for this person.

And I thought, is that her?

And there is this tall, young, beautiful woman, hair down, big high heels, tottering on these heels, right?

And I'm thinking, is that you?

And I looked at her.

She's there and she is full of life and she's expressing herself and she's telling me everything she's doing.

And it was wonderful to witness that.

She'd embraced her independence with the support.

Yes, managing it in terms of I don't have family, but you know, we have support around that.

But she is

me

although she is ago, you know, and she's got there quicker.

She can see and hear people just like her and it's given her hope and she's rebuilding her life.

Yeah, you're speeding up that process for so many women and girls because they've got examples to follow and support networks to fall into.

Absolutely.

To this day, Jasvinda is separated from her family.

Although her parents have now died, her siblings won't talk to her.

They still think she dishonoured them.

But towards the end of her parents' lives, Jasvinda was able to find some small moments of connection with them.

Mum was very young when she passed away.

When Rubina passed away, within a year my mother became ill she went quiet she didn't speak within 18 months she's in a hospice

and i remember going to this hospice when it's dark nobody can see me and my mother was this formidable woman you know she was five foot seven eight she was strong as an ox and she was this character that you did not cross

and mum was in her bed in the front room, and she was very weak.

I walked into the room, and she says that in Punjabi, I'm sorry, it smells in here.

And I said, It doesn't smell, mum, it's okay.

And she said, I really need to have a wash.

So I remember taking her upstairs for a bath, and I remember taking her out the bath and lifting her like a child.

She said, This is wrong, you're the child, I'm the mother.

And that was such a sad moment.

But

I looked at her and I thought,

all that time they've lost.

But I get you.

You know, mum,

you were a victim,

and the perpetrators are the family and the community that allow this to happen because she didn't have the freedom to break free from that.

And she was only doing

what she thought was best.

It doesn't make it right,

But I get that.

And it was the same for my father.

Jasvinda's dad died years after her mother.

In that time, Jasvinda had started Karma Nirvana, but she'd also gone to university.

I begged my father to come to my graduation.

And he didn't.

When my father passed away, he made me an executor of his will.

Never told me.

And my sisters were horrified because I was the sister that dishonoured the family.

In death my father spoke a thousand words because nobody could touch him then

and he's saying I trust you to do the right thing.

And I remember walking through the house I grew up in

and in the corner was my graduation picture in a frame.

You'd miss it.

He'd put it on a wall

but he was inwardly proud.

I

have the love and the conviction that I know that deep down somewhere my parents love me deeply, but they were suffocated on such a level by those around them that they were not able to demonstrate that.

There are loads of millions of women out there that are struggling to challenge this and men.

I get this,

but it's never going to change unless you do that.

Of course.

I think that kind of gets me onto one question that I wanted to ask you.

I think a lot of white Western-centered feminists struggle to talk about this topic of forced marriage because they worry about making comment or passing judgment on

cultures and races that aren't their own, and everyone's kind of very sensitive to the touch.

What would you say to people who kind of feel like that?

I know that I get a little bit nervous to talk about these things, and I just never want to say the wrong thing.

Absolutely.

And I never want to say the wrong thing, but just remember this.

Cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable.

So when I'm a 16-year-old in school or a 14-year-old school and I go missing, if the attitude is it's what they do,

then that person is gone.

But if the attitude was, why is that young girl missing, that Indian girl missing, that Pakistani girl missing, somebody needs to check to make sure she's okay.

And if somebody's saying, yeah, but I don't want to offend them, you know, it's could be their culture, we don't want to be called a racist, We've got to be careful.

No, hang on.

Let's think about this person missing.

There's a city in West Yorkshire where there are predominantly Asian families in Bradford.

And

over 100 young girls went missing off a school role in one academic year.

These were young Asian females, aged 15 to 16.

Nobody asked where they were.

And I was up in arms about this.

And the point I made was this.

If over 100 white British females went missing off a school roll in this country gone don't know where they are we would be jumping up and down and be everywhere we didn't ask the question about these girls because they were Pakistani they were Indian the attitude of the teachers was it's what they do and that is the sadly sterling attitude that exists today

Yeah, I campaigned for the criminalisation of forced marriage in this country for 10 years and forced marriage is now a criminal offence in the UK.

Please say other countries have followed and I was such a strong campaigner to make forced marriage a criminal offence because I could never say to my mother when I was 14, you can't do this to me, it's against the law.

But they can now.

Thank you so much to Jasvinda Sangera for this conversation, but mainly, well, for doing like everything that she's done.

What an amazing woman.

Jaspinda has continued to work on behalf of women since stepping back from Karma Nirvana.

As I record this in 2025, she's working with Harrods as their independent survivor advocate in the wake of the huge Mohammed Al-Fayed sexual assault scandal.

In the past, she's held a similar role with the Church of England.

Jaspinda says she's now also training to become a therapist in her 60s, whereas I'm exhausted just at the prospect of taking my dog out for a walk around the block.

For all this work, in February 2025, Jasvinda was knighted by King Charles himself.

So she's now officially a dame.

Go Jasvinda.

If you want to find out more about Karma Nirvana, check out the link in our show notes.

If you're in the UK and you want to reach their helpline, their number is 0800-5999-247.

If you're based in the US, you can contact Unchained At Last, who do similar kinds of work over in the States.

Their website is also linked in the show notes.

If you've enjoyed this conversation, you can find loads more incredible women on our feed.

Do check them out.

And please do spread the word and tell your friends about us.

We want as many people as possible to be part of the Girlfriends gang.

Next time on the Girlfriend Spotlight, Phyllis saves the people from poisoning.

They told me that they had noticed that the air had become very toxic.

They could not breathe.

The water that seeped from the industry into the river had changed the taste of the water.

It tasted metallic.

This season, we're supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide.

They do amazing work to help women's rights organisations and movements to strengthen and grow.

If you'd like to find out more or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls across the globe, you can go to womankind.org.uk.

The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeart podcasts.

For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield.

This episode was written and produced by Jake Otaevich.

Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr.

Our researcher is Zayana Youssef.

The editor is Hannah Marshall.

Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers.

Production management from Joe Savage, Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolf.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson.

Music supervision by Jake Otajevich, Nicholas Alexander and Anna Sinfield.

Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein and Gemma Freeman.

The series artwork was designed by Christina Lemkuhl.

Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development.

And special thanks to Katrina Norvell, Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcast, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME.

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