Britain Today

[BIAD]

Maybe the western societal 'taboos' promoted by past scientific advice should be looked at
again in the name of diversity? Unless... the BBC are just talking to a couple of teenagers
and creating a counter-narrative to continue the school-yard race arguments?
 

Fewer cousins marrying in Bradford's Pakistani community



'The number of people in Bradford's Pakistani community who have married a cousin has fallen
sharply in the past 10 years, a study suggests. Higher educational attainment, new family
dynamics and changes in immigration rules are thought to be possible reasons.

Juwayriya Ahmed married her cousin in 1988. The 52-year-old teacher says her children once
asked her how she and their father met. "I was laughing at them. I said I didn't really meet him.
My parents took me to Pakistan and my dad said you're going to marry this person. And I sort
of knew who he was, but the first time I met him properly was at the wedding," she says.

"My kids said that was disgusting. And then they told me, 'Don't you dare make us do anything
like this.'" Ten years ago researchers studying the health of more than 30,000 people in Bradford
found that about 60% of babies in the Pakistani community had parents who were first or second
cousins, but a new follow-up study of mothers in three inner-city wards finds the figure has dropped
to 46%.

The original research also demonstrated that cousin marriage roughly doubled the risk of birth defects,
though they remained rare, affecting 6% of children born to cousins.

"In just under a decade we've had a significant shift from cousin marriage being, in a sense, a majority
activity to now being just about a minority activity," said Dr John Wright, chief investigator of the Born
in Bradford research project. "The effect will be fewer children with congenital anomalies."

Cousin marriage is widespread in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where many Bradford families
originate. Sometimes a young person in Bradford is married to a cousin in Pakistan, who then
comes to live in the UK. But members of the community say there have been inter-generational
tensions over this tradition, with some young people firmly rejecting the idea of arranged marriage
- and cousin marriage in particular.

"Our generation really fought for it," says one young woman.
"Ten years ago my mum was adamant we would all have cousin marriages but now she doesn't focus
on that. I think families realised they couldn't control it. They knew that being in Britain, and being
exposed to so many different viewpoints, it is going to change."

The Born in Bradford study originally recruited 12,453 pregnant women without regard to ethnicity
between 2007 and 2010, whose children all joined the project when they were born. Their health
has been tracked ever since.

Another 2,378 mothers from three inner-city wards were then recruited for a follow-up study between
2016 and 2019. The new research compares them with the 2,317 participants from the same wards
in the original cohort. In both cases, mothers of Pakistani heritage made up between 60% and 65%
of the total, and while 62% of these women in the original group were married to a first or second
cousin, the figure fell to 46% in the later group. The fall was even steeper in the fast-growing
sub-group of mothers who were born in the UK - from 60% to 36%.

For those educated beyond A-level, the proportion who married a cousin was already lower than
average in the first study, at 46%, and has now fallen to 38%. Although the women included in
the latest study are all from less affluent inner-city wards, the researchers say they are still
representative of Pakistani-heritage mothers in Bradford as a whole.

Professor of health research, Neil Small, who has been involved with Born in Bradford from the start,
says a number of possible explanations for the rapid fall in cousin marriage are now being explored
in consultation with the community:

*Awareness of the risk of congenital anomalies has increased
*Staying in education longer is influencing young people's choices
*Shifting family dynamics are changing conversations about marriage between parents and children
*Changes in immigration rules have made it harder for spouses to move to the UK

One person affected by new immigration rules was Bradford-born Ayesha, who married her first cousin
in Pakistan eight years ago and gave birth to their first child the following year. Her husband was unable
to move to the UK until the baby was two. Meanwhile Ayesha had to work long hours as a home care
worker to reach a salary threshold introduced in 2012 for anyone wanting to bring a spouse from outside
Europe to live in the country.

She thinks cousin marriage is a valuable tradition though, and regrets that it appears to be in decline.
"I don't think my children will marry cousins. They will lose that connection with Pakistan and I feel sad
about that," she says. In fact, two of Ayesha's younger sisters, both in their 20s, have rejected the idea
of cousin marriage. One, Salina, recently married a man of her own choice, with her parents' consent.

"I'm outgoing and I want to work and do things with my life. Someone from Pakistan wouldn't accept this
at all," she says. "They would never let me live like this. We wouldn't agree on how to raise kids and how
to teach them values." The other sister, Malika, is also planning one day to choose her own husband.

"Before, even if you had an education, you wouldn't be expected to carry on with it, you would have been
thinking of marriage," she says. "Now that's changed and the mindset is so different." She adds that
young people today have more opportunities to meet potential partners than their parents ever did,
and that social media has helped provide "contact with people outside our parents' eyes".

The Born in Bradford team has made efforts to explain to the community how congenital anomalies come
about. They occur when both parents carry a particular defective gene, which may happen when the parents
are unrelated, but is more likely when they are cousins. Anomalies can affect the heart, the nervous system,
limbs, the skin or other parts of the body. They are sometimes untreatable and can be fatal.

Dr Aamra Darr, a medical sociologist with the University of Bradford's Faculty of Health Studies, says cousin
marriage is a risk factor, but not a cause of congenital anomalies. She points out that the 2013 Born in Bradford
study showed that the risk of married cousins having a baby with a congenital anomaly was similar to that of
a white British woman aged 35 or over having a baby with an anomaly, including Down's Syndrome.

However, she says health workers have sometimes told parents of a sick child in the Pakistani community:
"It's because you married your cousin." "It's culture blaming," she says. "You're talking about the politics of
race and health - the minority being judged by the majority population."...'

(More in the link)

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