Spoon in underwear saving youths from forced marriage

LONDON, England (AFP) –  As Britain puts airport staff on alert to spot potential victims of forced marriage, one campaigning group says the trick of putting a spoon in their underwear has saved some youngsters from a forced union in their South Asian ancestral homelands.

The concealed spoon sets off the metal detector at the airport in Britain and the teenagers can be taken away from their parents to be searched -- a last chance to escape a largely hidden practice wrecking the lives of unknown thousands of British youths.

The British school summer holidays, now well under way, mark a peak in reports of young people -- typically girls aged 15 and 16 -- being taken abroad on "holiday", for a marriage without consent, the government says.

The bleep at airport security may be the last chance they get to escape a marriage to someone they have never met in a country they have never seen.

The spoon trick is the brainchild of the Karma Nirvana charity, which supports victims and survivors of forced marriage and honour-based abuse.

Based in Derby, central England, it fields 6,500 calls per year from around Britain but has almost reached that point so far in 2013 as awareness of the issue grows.

When petrified youngsters ring, "if they don't know exactly when it may happen or if it's going to happen, we advise them to put a spoon in their underwear," said Natasha Rattu, Karma Nirvana's operations manager.

"When they go though security, it will highlight this object in a private area and, if 16 or over, they will be taken to a safe space where they have that one last opportunity to disclose they're being forced to marry," she told AFP.

"We've had people ring and that it's helped them and got them out of a dangerous situation. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do with your family around you -- but they won't be aware you have done it. It's a safe way."

The charity is working with airports -- so far London Heathrow, Liverpool and Glasgow, with Birmingham to come -- to spot potential signs, such as one-way tickets, the time of year, age of the person and whether they look uncomfortable.

"These are quite general points, but there are things that if you look collectively lead you to believe something more sinister is going on," said Rattu.

People who come forward can be escorted out of a secure airport exit to help outside.

Marriages without consent, or their refusal, have led to suicides and so-called honour killings, shocking a nation widely deemed to have successfully absorbed immigrant communities and customs.

Officials fear the number of victims coming forward is just the tip of the iceberg, with few community leaders prepared to speak out and risk losing their support base.

One woman, whose identity was protected by Essex Police in southeast England, was forced to get married in India.

She said she was threatened by her father "because he said if I thought about running away he would find me and kill me".

"I was shipped off with a total stranger.

"That night I was raped by my husband and this abuse continued for about eight and half years of my life."

She eventually fled.

Last year, the Foreign Office's Forced Marriage Unit dealt with some 1,500 cases -- 18 percent of them men.

A third of cases involved children aged under 17. The oldest victim was aged 71; the youngest just two.

The cases related to 60 countries: almost half were linked to Pakistan, 11 percent to Bangladesh, eight percent to India, and two percent to Afghanistan. Other countries were Somalia, Turkey and Iraq.

Calls to Karma Nirvana tend to spike before the British school summer holidays and again at the end, said Rattu.

"The holidays are a really good time for young people to go missing because there is nobody accounting for where they are at school," she said.

Since Ramadan ended last week, calls have risen again, including one from an 18-year-old who has fallen pregnant and her family is trying force her into marriage to conceal it.

Burdened by South Asian codes of "izzat", or family honour, youngsters can be under extreme physical and emotional duress to marry relatives in a culture and country they were not brought up in.

If they refuse, they are often threatened with being thrown out of the family -- or worse.

"It really takes a brave person to stand up against their family," said Rattu.

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Man uses spoon to break out of Russian maximum-security prison

Russian officials say Oleg Topalov used only a spoon to escape from a maximum security prison (Federal Prison Supervision …

One man, using only a spoon, has escaped from one of Russia’s most infamous prisons.

Sky News reports that 33-year-old Oleg Topalov escaped from Matrosskaya Tishina, apparently by using a single spoon to dig a hole through his cell’s ceiling.

He is only the fourth person in 20 years to escape from the prison. Russian investigators have blamed Topalov’s escape on the prison staff, who they say engaged in a, "dishonest or careless attitude to their work that was made use of by the prisoner Topalov."

Topalov, who was sentenced for double murder and arms trafficking, used the spoon to create a hole in the cell’s roof, opened a ventilation shaft and then climbed to the prison’s roof, finally escaping over the building’s perimeter fence.

"Because of the building being run-down, Topalov had no difficulty in widening the vent of the air-shaft, through which he got to the prison’s roof,” Russian Federal Penitentiary Service representative Kristina Belousova told RIA Novosti. “Using sheets tied one to another he managed to go down the wall, then jump over the fence and run away.”

One unnamed witness says Topalov didn’t use sheets, but rather acquired rope from the prison’s psychiatric ward.

Prison officials described Topalov as “mentally unstable and liable to escape,” and have offered a “large reward” for his capture.

Interestingly, under Russian law, Topalov only faces an additional four years of incarceration if he is captured.

Reports said Topalov shared a cell with around seven other prisoners, though it’s unclear what role, if any, they played in his daring escape.

Matrosskaya Tishina was first opened in 1946 and is considered one of Russia’s most secure prisons. Over the years, it has been home to high-profile Russian prisoners, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Sergey Magnitsky.

Inmates and their cells are checked each day for illegal objects. Because of this strict enforcement policy, investigators say Topalov could only have used a spoon to make his escape attempt.

Prison service spokesman Sergei Tsygankov said Topalov had been singled out as someone who was likely to make a prison escape attempt. And while Russian officially typically are reluctant to provide details surrounding inmates, they have released pictures of Topalov to the public as part of their attempts to apprehend the former organized crime member.

The prison’s last known escape occurred in 2005, when convicted hitman Aleksandr Solonik used mountain climbing equipment provided to him by a prison officer to escape. The pair rappelled over the prison’s walls using 20 feet of rope and have not been seen in public since.

Moscow's maxium security prison, Matrosskaya Tishina, as seen in a 2009 photo (AFP)

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