Sham Marriage

Followers of the British press in the mid-2010s could be forgiven for thinking that an epidemic of modern slavery had overtaken the UK, the epitome of which was evident in the cruelty visited on those sold into sham marriages. In this chapter, we discuss how marriages of convenience have become regulated through immigration controls, and why they are not always reducible to the exploitation and entrapment associated with modern slavery. Without denying the harms produced by forced marriages, the two case studies presented in this chapter raise deeper questions about why some people need to pay for or arrange marriages, and how their motives are shaped by the fear of immigration controls, deportation and indebtedness, sometimes derivative of inequalities caused by the legacies of European colonialism.