The Tahirih Justice Center is one of the U.S.’s foremost legal defense organizations for immigrant women and girls fleeing human rights abuses such as domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, torture, genital mutilation, and “honor” crimes. Since 1997, Tahirih has assisted over 12,000 women and girls.

One morning three years ago, they received a call from a family attorney who was struggling to help a teenage girl. She was a U.S. citizen whose south Asian-born parents threatened to beat her into submitting to a forced marriage. She’d taken the “courageous step of running away to a domestic violence shelter,” Tahirih writes in a new research report. “The shelter gave her temporary refuge, but was unsure how long they could keep her there. Her parents were threatening to sue the shelter, her attorney, and anyone else who tried to help her.” In the end, the girl was returned to her parents after children’s protective services declined to get involved, seeing it as a “cultural issue.” Tahirih doesn’t know what happened to the girl after that.

But her story and an increasing number like hers was “a definite catalyst,” says Heather Heiman, a Senior Attorney at Tahirih, to turn their attention to the “serious but hidden” problem of forced marriage in the U.S.—marriages that occur “without the full and free consent of one or both parties.”

As part of their new Forced Marriage Initiative, Tahirih conducted a national survey this summer of community organizations and leaders who may have encountered forced marriages, to get a sense of the problem. Over 500 agencies in 47 states responded.

Through this and other work Tahirih has identified 3,000 known and suspected cases in just the last two years.  And that’s likely the tip of the iceberg. Two out of three respondents on their survey felt that there were forced marriage cases not being identified in the populations they work with.

The UK estimated 5,000 to 8,000 forced marriages in 2009 alone. Some of these young women join the ranks of the disappeared, the shadow victims of globalization. In one year, 2,089 students were unaccounted for in 14 UK school districts, some of whom were “believed to have been…removed from education and forced into marriage overseas.”

The UK’s taken the lead in combating forced marriage since the early 1990s, when a number of highly-publicized murder cases involving forced marriages and subsequent “honor”-based violence galvanized a national response. The UK now has a dedicated “forced marriage unit” in law enforcement, a national helpline, and even has conducted overseas rescue operations to stop forced marriages in action. The law also provides for “forced marriage protective orders” in family court.

Forced marriage survivor Jasvinder Sanghera founded Karma Nirvana, a UK organization that assists victims. Sanghera escaped a forced marriage her parents had planned for her. She took action after one of her sisters, in despair at being forced to remain in an abusive marriage to protect family honor, set herself on fire and died.

Although Tahirih’s work focuses on advocacy for immigrant women, they hasten to add that forced marriage isn’t confined to any one religion or group. They know of cases involving 56 countries of origin—the majority coming from India (39), Pakistan (39), Mexico (28), and Bangladesh (14). The U.S. has its own history of forced marriage, including the “shotgun wedding.”