Marrying Your First Cousin

Many people would find the idea of marrying a first cousin shocking, but such marriages are not unusual in some Pakistanis and other Muslim communities.

It is estimated that at least 55% of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins and the tradition is also common among some other South Asian communities and in some Middle Eastern countries. But there is a problem: marrying someone who is themselves a close family member carries a risk for children - a risk that lies within the code of life; within our genes. Communities that practice cousin marriage experience higher levels of some very rare but very serious illnesses - illnesses known as recessive genetic disorders.

Open debate

Now, one Labour MP is calling for an end to the practice. "We have to stop this tradition of first cousin marriages," Keighley MP Ann Cryer tells Newsnight. Mrs Cryer believes an open debate on the subject is needed because - despite the risks - cousin marriage remains very popular. Mrs Cryer's constituency is in the Bradford area, where the rates of cousin marriage are well above the national average. It is estimated that three out of four marriages within Bradford's Pakistani community are between first cousins.

Variant genes

Recessive genetic disorders are caused by variant genes. There are hundreds of different recessive genetic disorders, many associated with severe disability and sometimes early death, and each caused by a different variant gene. We all have two copies of every gene. If you inherit one variant gene you will not fall ill. If, however, a child inherits a copy of the same variant gene from each of its parents it will develop one of these illnesses. The variant genes that cause genetic illness tend to be very rare. In the general population the likelihood of a couple having the same variant gene is a hundred to one. In cousin marriages, if one partner has a variant gene the risk that the other has it too is far higher - more like one in eight. Myra Ali has a very rare recessive genetic condition, known as Epidermolisis Bulosa. Her parents were first cousins. So were her grandparents. "My skin is really fragile, and can blister very easily with a slight knock or tear," she says. Myra has strong views about the practice of cousin marriage as a result. "I'm against it, because there's a high risk of illness occurring", she says.

Denial

According to Ann Cryer MP, whose Keighley constituency has a large Pakistani population, much of the Pakistani community is in denial about the problem. She tells Newsnight that she believes it is time for an open debate on the subject: "As we address problems of smoking, drinking, obesity, we say it's a public health issue, and therefore we all have to get involved with it in persuading people to adopt a different lifestyle", she says. "I think the same should be applied to this problem in the Asian community. They must adopt a different lifestyle. They must look outside the family for husbands and wives for their young people."

Parents have a prime duty to arrange decent marriages for their offspring. A parent who did not do so would be lacking in responsibility, and held by Allah to be at fault. (In Islam, this is true).

· Parents are supposed to seek out the best possible and most compatible partner for their offspring. (True. But a girl’s cousin may not be the best possible or most compatible partner at all, and parents who try to insist upon this link and reject other more compatible partners are doing their daughters no service, but are actually going against Islam).

· Girls are expected to be virgins up to their wedding days, and a father has a strong duty to protect the virgin status of his daughters. (True).

· A girl’s honour is of vital concern, and any lack of honourable behaviour on her part can shame the entire family. (This is culturally true. However, when ‘preserving the family honour’ results in a murder, then Islam has been abandoned. Islam teaches unambiguously that no one person will ever be held to blame by Allah for the sins of another – the father is not to blame for a shameful daughter, and any person who murders another will face judgement here on earth and in the Life to Come).

· Boys are also expected not to ‘sleep around’, but there is less surveillance over boys than girls. (The requirement of chastity is the same in Islam for both boys and girls).

· Young Muslims, especially girls, are not expected to marry anyone without their parents’ consent. This can also apply to women well past the first flush of youth.

(This is a matter of politeness and for the sake of family peace. It is expected in Islam for youngsters making their first marriages; it is not expected for older persons, who may arrange their own marriages).

· Virtuous youngsters will respect the judgement and good intentions of their parents and accept their will without making a fuss, even if they have never seen the prospective spouse until the actual wedding. (This does still happen, more frequently than non-Muslims realize – especially amongst Arab cultures. It may be acceptable for a shy girl or boy who has lived a very sheltered life, but in Islam, the prospective spouses have the absolute right to refuse each other, and the parents do not have the right to insist on an unwanted match. The Prophet annulled forced marriages).

· Many parents will ignore fuss and fears as merely natural in a modest girl, things that will soon pass once the marriage is up and running. (This is not a matter of Islam – just luck).

· The best form of marriage will be one between cousins. (This is not a ruling of Islam, but a matter of culture).

Examples of force or coercion

However, in spite of the rights of young potential spouses (especially the young women) in Islam, there are many sorts of coercive comments made to girls who refuse to go along with their parents’ plans. They combine to give the girls the impression that they are bad daughters, and will inevitably damage any other prospects of marriage if they turn down this one, because they are being:

· Unkind and hurtful to the hopeful relative back home, plus entire family

· Ungrateful, especially if the family ‘back home’ has helped their parents get on in life, or assisted them in reaching the UK

· dismissive of Islam

· rebellious and disobedient

· dismissive of their family values

· don’t care if they shame their parents

· don’t care if they make their parents look stupid

· don’t care if they drive their parents to an early grave.

Sometimes the pressure goes to the lengths of:

· withdrawing the girl from school, often in her GCSE year (Year 11)

· confining her to the house or her bedroom

· physical punishment or abuse

· death threats – someone in the family will ‘do the right thing’ to ‘avenge’ the upset parents.

I have this week counselled one highly educated and gainfully employed young woman in her twenties, who has seven sisters and a brother, who faces horrendous disappointment and wrath from her parents because she does not wish to marry a cousin from their home village but a British-born Pakistani man of her own choice. Her parents are devastated and embarrassed by her refusal, the mother’s dead mother will never rest in peace etc, because promises had been made. Is it so much to ask that one daughter out of the eight will accept the cousin whose family wish him to come and live in the UK, so that he can help their family out financially? The poor young woman feels they have actually been trying to lay curses upon her, and her brother has threatened to kill her.

Health alert?

Apart from the issue of forced marriages, a second issue is now ringing alarm bells – the fear that cousin-marriage could be the cause of major health and inherited genetic problems. The great hazard of inbreeding is that it can result in the unmasking of deleterious recessives, to use the clinical language of geneticists.

The variant genes that cause recessive genetic illnesses tend to be rare. In the general population, the likelihood of a couple having the same variant gene is 100-1. But in cousin-marriages, if one partner has a variant gene, the risk that the other has it too is more likely to be one in eight.

Doctors in areas where there is much cousin-marriage are indeed seeing a big increase in the number of children born with serious genetic disabilities. Each of us carries an unknown number of genes capable of killing our children or grandchildren – an individual typically has between five and seven. These so-called lethal recessives are associated with diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia.

Most lethal genes never get expressed unless we inherit the recessive form of the gene from both our mother and father. But when both parents come from the same gene pool, their children are more likely to inherit two recessives.

One couple, for example, was recently raising two apparently healthy children. Then, when they were 5 and 7, both were diagnosed with neural degenerative disease in the same week. The children are now slowly dying. Neural degenerative diseases are eight times more common in Bradford than in the rest of the United Kingdom.

Some thought-provokers.

· A report on the impact of genetic risk on Britain’s Pakistani/Bangladeshi families published by the Wellcome Trust in 2003 found that infant mortality and childhood morbidity rates were higher in this ethnic group than in any other groups, although marrying relatives did not always result in the birth of children with recessive disorders.

· An investigation by BBC Newsnight recently claimed that the British Pakistani/Bangladeshi community, in which at least 55% of those married were married to a first-cousin, were at least 13 times more likely to have children with recessive genetic disorders than the general population of the UK. This group accounted for only 3.4% of all births in the UK, but for 30% of all British children born with recessive disorders (which include cystic fibrosis), and had a noticeably higher rate of infant mortality.

· Dr Peter Corry, a consultant paediatrician at Bradford royal infirmary, disclosed that his hospital saw a disproportionately high rate of recessive genetic illnesses. He and his team have identified some 140 different autosomal recessive disorders among local children, whereas a typical district would ‘only’ see between 20 and 30.