Sameem Ali’s life is as neat and tidy as the small red-brick terraced house in which she lives in Moss Side, Manchester. She’s a first-time author, a happily married mother of two grown-up sons and, since organising her neighbours to lobby the city council to spend £1 million to clean up their area, renovate houses, plant trees and stop fly-tipping, a busy councillor. “This is my community now,” Sameem says. Even her book is called Belonging, but that is where the neatness ends and something altogether more alarming and brutal takes it place. “To this day I cry when I remember all the things that were done to me,” she says. “My memories are not a comfort to me, a place to retreat to; they are a curse.”

In Belonging, Sameem tells how she was abused by her family, taken to Pakistan at the age of 13 and forced to marry a man who would rape her repeatedly. She was pregnant by the time she was 14, but at the age of 17 she escaped her family and, a few months later, a kidnap attempt by armed men hired to bring her back. Years later she was told that a 5cm tumour had lodged itself in her head. If it were a novel, you would think it far-fetched, but the horror of her forced marriage happened exactly as Sameem tells it and her story is not unique. What is unique is that she has broken a taboo to expose the abuse suffered by many young people in Britain.

“I want to inspire women to have a voice, whatever they are going through,” says the 38-year-old. “It was many years before I raised my voice.”

Nobody knows exactly how many people are victims of forced marriages, but every year 200 people are repatriated to the UK after they have been taken abroad against their will to marry, while the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit gets 5,000 calls for advice. Most victims are women, although 15 per cent are boys. At its most extreme, the victims end up dead, like one teenager from Cheshire who claimed that she had been abused by her mother and father for not marrying the man of their choice. Her decomposing body was washed up on a riverbank in the North of England in February 2004. According to the coroner, she was “the victim of a very vile murder”. Nobody has ever been charged.

“It makes me shudder,” says Sameem. “Somebody knows who did it.” She knows too that it could so easily have been her dredged out of a river, or not found at all.

Although 90 per cent of reported forced marriages involve Muslims and 90 per cent are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage, “it is not just a Muslim problem”, Sameem explains. “We hear more about them because the taboo is beginning to be broken and more girls are speaking out. In ten years’ time, other communities, from China, the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa, will have to face up to the same reality.”

Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, agreed when, as a Home Office minister in 2006, she initiated a national publicity campaign to highlight “a form of domestic violence and human rights abuse. Forced marriage affects children, teenagers and adults from all races and religions, including Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs.” Last year the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act came into force, giving teachers, social workers, women’s rights groups, local councils and other third parties the power to go to court to prevent or pre-empt forced marriages. “All these initiatives are welcome,” says Sameem, “but we need to work inside the communities where forced marriages are still accepted and where children are afraid to go against their parents. I want to see posters up in schools with helplines displayed prominently and children putting on a play and acting out a forced marriage and inviting the parents to come and watch. Show, don’t tell, is the only way to break the taboo. Bringing this issue into the open will give girls and boys the courage to call for help.”

Sameem did not set out to fight a cause. “I started writing to heal myself,” she says. “I wrote and cried, wrote and cried. As I wrote I began to notice stories on the news of girls being taken away to places like Pakistan and India and being forced into marriage or killed if they refused. Nothing was being written that might help girls like them to escape this terrible thing.” Surprisingly, she has nothing against arranged marriages. “I think they can work if they are done with the full agreement of all parties, but being physically and emotionally blackmailed into it is not an arranged marriage.”

Sameem grew up in Staffordshire and her early childhood was an idyllic and safe one. The woman who read to her, and whom she still calls Auntie Peggy, inspired her love of stories. “Auntie Peggy was a small, chubby lady with a round face and friendly eyes and who smelled of soap, flowers and warm bread,” she says. “She taught us how to love and how to forgive, and that has never left me.”

“Auntie” Peggy in fact ran the local authority children’s home where Sameem was placed when she was six months old. Sameem’s mother had gynaecological problems after giving birth to her and returned to Pakistan with Sameem’s brothers, Manz and Saber, and sisters, Tara and Mena (she also has a younger brother, Salim). “Obviously I didn’t have a passport and I was not on my mother’s, so my father stayed behind, but he could not look after me properly because he was working.” She also knows now that her father, whom she adored and who visited her when he could, disappeared frequently from her life because of his schizophrenia.

Even when her mother returned to Britain, Sameem still remained in care. “She never came to visit me. I didn’t know who she was.” Four years ago, Sameem was given her children’s home records and in them she discovered why. “My mother, when she did finally visit, had commented to the staff that my feet were not right.” Sameem’s feet turned inwards at the ankles, caused by her awkward birth, and it was to take many operations to correct the defect. “I do not feel rejected for being less than perfect,” she says. “After all, even though walking was a problem, I was happy at the children’s home.”

Just shy of her seventh birthday, Sameem was suddenly taken back by her mother. As they pulled up outside the family’s home in Walsall, north of Birmingham, she went to grab her mother’s hand for reassurance. “Chal ander!” her mother snapped, brushing her hand away. Get inside! Sameem did not understand Punjabi. “From her tone I should have guessed, but I was not even seven years old, and desperately wanted to be loved and accepted like at the children’s home.”

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