Excerpt:
The original tale may be apocryphal, but the story of the silver spoon has saved the lives of hundreds of British Muslim girls being forced into marriage by their parents. "Put a spoon in your knickers," a counselor at the British organization Karma Nirvana told a young girl being sent abroad to wed against her will. Karma Nirvana attends to the needs of girls being threatened with forced marriage, many of whom are under the age of 17.
The idea behind the plot was simple, but ingenious: the spoon would set off alarms at airport security, whereupon the unwilling bride-to-be could explain her situation to a law enforcement officer who could then intervene to protect her.
The ploy evidently worked, and has been adopted since by other young women in the UK, most of them British-born, who are sent to their parents' original homes and villages in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere to marry first cousins they have never met, conscribed to a life of servitude and worse.