While Susan Faludi et al twitter on about the Bush patriarchy, thousands of young women – supposedly citizens of free societies – are simply disappearing:

A new study has found that the practice of forced marriage among immigrants in Britain is much more common than previously assumed. Thousands of young girls — and boys — have gone missing, many of whom might have been abducted by their own parents… Take, for example, the northern English city of Bradford. The majority of the city’s population of 500,000 is Muslim. Brennan shocked his fellow MPs when he reported that 33 Bradford children under 16 of age have disappeared without trace. He wasn’t sure if the police in Bradford were even looking for the children. According to Brennan’s report, the statistics look similar in an additional 14 communities with a high percentage of immigrants. All told, hundreds of children have disappeared from the school registers in Great Britain — whereabouts unknown.

I’ll bet Mr Brennan’s right, and the Bradford police aren’t looking for the kids. They’re sensitive to a fault when it comes to what they regard as a, ahem, “cultural” issue:

Every year, 3,000 British schoolgirls vanish. One day they are in their classroom, the next they are gone – forced by their Asian families into marriages abroad.
Yet despite this shocking figure, which was revealed this month, few question the girls’ absence.
The police and teachers are often reluctant to intervene for fear of being seen as racist.

But it gets better. If you’re a charity that specializes in helping Asian girls from being forced into marriage, the relevant municipal body in London will withdraw funding because you’re insufficiently “inclusive”. The writer, by the way, is a British Muslim woman whose mother was the victim of an “honor killing”.