(UK) Ministers face calls for apology as extent of 1970s 'virginity tests' revealed

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

Ministers are facing demands for an official apology to at least 80 Asian women who were subjected to "virginity tests'' by immigration staff when they tried to come to Britain in the late 1970s.

The demands follow the disclosure of confidential Home Office files that show that intimate examinations – used to "check the marital status" of Indian and Pakistani women coming to Britain to marry – were on a far wider scale than was previously known.

The practice was banned in February 1979 after the Guardian exclusively reported that a 35-year-old Indian woman teacher was examined by a male doctor when she arrived at Heathrow to test whether she was a genuine wife-to-be who had not borne children and was still a virgin.

The Home Office initially denied that any internal examination had taken place. The woman told the Guardian's then social services correspondent, Melanie Phillips, that she only signed a form consenting to a "gynaecological examination, that may be vaginal if necessary" because she was frightened she would otherwise be sent back to India.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/08/home-office-virginity-tests-1970s

[Wabbajack_]

1. Legalized sexual assault

is what it was. So the officials could get off. Sick.

[Billy Burnett]

2. Like the new Florida trans vaginal scan required before an abortion.

Florida... sick and getting sicker.

[primavera]

6. I wish

But I think it's too easy to dismiss stuff like this as a handful of pervs getting their jollies. What I hear when I read articles like this is yet another expression of the enforcement ends-justify-the-means mentality that tragically extends far beyond just a handful of individuals.

[sabrina 1]

3. There are some people in this country who think it's okay

to do an 'internal' exam of women boarding planes in this country, in case, you know, they might be hiding something inside their bodies. Anything to feel a little safer say even , I hate to say it, some democrats! Rapiscans, internal exams, whatever the leader of the country deems necessary for 'national security'. :eyes:

[BlueIris]

4. Horrifying. nt

[jmowreader]

5. What is astounding...

is the idea that only virgins should be allowed to get married.

I wonder: Would a woman from India who had been married then widowed, then found a British man to be her second husband, be turned away at Heathrow because she'd had sex in her previous marriage?