Justice Singer, in a landmark judgment, also ruled that parents who take their children abroad to marry them off against their will were guilty of child abduction. The precedent this sets will be welcomed by people who have long campaigned to protect British Asian women from the fate that Anita so narrowly escaped.

Anita's story began in April last year. She fled home to live with her 19-year-old sister, who had herself escaped to avoid being forced into marriage. Since Anita was legally underage, her parents informed thepolice. Anita's sister told the police that if they returned her to her parents, she would be taken forcibly to Punjab to be married off. The police ignored her, probably because they are usually wary of interfering in the "religious" practices of ethnic minorities.

In June 1998, Anita was taken to India and left in the "custody" of her father's sister in Punjab. Her passport was taken away and her every movement watched. Desperate and apparently suicidal, she managed to smuggle a letter back to her sister in England, pleading for help. Her determined sister contacted lawyer Anne-Marie Hutchinson, who is also chairman of Reunite, a charity that deals with child abductions.

Together, they initiated court proceedings to make Anita a ward of the court and remove her from her parent's control. Time was of the essence. Once Anita was 18, she would have been beyond the reach of English law. Justice Singer, known for his radical approach to the law, wanted to establish what Anita really wanted. Her parentsinsisted that she wanted to stay in India and furnished a taped telephone call and faxes purportedly from her saying so.

Justice Singer arranged for officials from the British High Commission in Delhi to interview Anita. However, they found she was being moved from one place to another to evade them. Justice Singer concluded that Anita's parents were only trying to delay legal proceedings in Britain and keep her in India until her 18th birthday.

He then took the unprecedented step of drawing up an order -- in perfect legalese but without any legal standing -- requiring "every person in a position to do so to co-operate in assisting and securing the immediate return to England of `Anita'". Interpol and the Indian police were now involved.

Eventually, however, it was Anita who convinced her brother and her parents that she should be taken to the British High Commission in Delhi, where she would confirm what they wanted her to say. There, Anita said that she wanted go home to London.

She arrived back onMarch 5, almost a year after she had been forced to go to Punjab.

The court has since issued a protection order, preventing her family from attempting to kidnap or forcibly remove her again. Anita, now 18, is living with her sister and trying to rebuild her life. She is going back to school to take her GCSE exams. Hutchinson said that the sisters had to cope with living without the support of a family. "It is very hard for them. It means leaving their home, friends and relations... But if she had not got out she said she would have rather committed suicide than gone through with that marriage."

Justice Singer accepts that this case may represent an affront to the "traditional values" of many British Asians. But, he added, "The courts will not permit what is, at best, the exploitation of an individual and many in the worst case amount to outright trafficking for financial consideration."