Karma Nirvana provides help to victims of honour-based abuse and forced marriage in the UK, as well as equipping schools, authorities and emergency services with training and awareness programs.
The charity was founded in 1993 by Jasvinder Sanghera, who escaped forced marriage by running away from home when she was 16. Sanghera was awarded a CBE in 2013, and was instrumental in passing a UK law that criminalised forced marriage the next year.
Bill Dost, D&D Leasing chief executive officer, said: “We chose Karma Nirvana as our charity this year because honour-based abuse remains a relatively unpublicized, and often unspoken, concern – but one that affects many people in the UK. Honour-based abuse, long thought to be gender based, only affecting girls and women, is a much broader problem – the true extent of which Karma Nirvana has revealed.
“It was also thought that this was only an issue for ‘other people, elsewhere’, but we need to come to terms with the fact that it is a reality in the UK. and that anyone can be subjected to it. For many people it’s likely that someone we know in our social circles has been a victim of it, or affected by it.”
