Get to Know the Team: Helen

My name is Helen McCabe, and I am an Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham, where I also lead the work on forced marriage at the Rights Lab.

I first started researching forced marriage in 2017, as a result of the International Labour Organisation and Walk Free including forced marriage in their Global Estimates of Modern Slavery. Forced marriage hadn’t previously really been included as a form of modern slavery (apart from in Australia, where Walk Free are based), and this posed a number of questions, not least “is forced marriage a form of modern slavery, and/or should we think about it as being one?”. I was already interested in questions about marriage and consent (and the extent to which women have no other option by to marry) through work on 19^th century feminists like John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, who made visceral attacks on marriage, often likening it to a form of slavery.

I am currently working on a project looking at what data is collected on Honour-Based Abuse, by whom, and what they do with it. The aim is to improve understanding of data collection practices across the sector and share best practice, ultimately leading to more, and better, data being collected and centrally shared. Good data is at the basis of robust evidence-based policy, and thus at efforts to end forced marriage by 2030 in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. I love working with my project partners, Karma Nirvana, and I find finding out new things about data very interesting, but I don’t always enjoy a day looking at Excel spreadsheets!

I got involved with the “Drawing on Forced Marriage” project because Hannah was working with me when she dreamed it up, and I was fortunate to be able to help with some of the early project design and applying for the funding. It’s great to see how it is developing – and particularly to see the comics themselves!

I think the use of comics to engage young people is really exciting. I love seeing the finished comics, and all the art created in response to them, as well as people engaging with the art, and the topic at the heart of it, learning, and sharing their own ideas and opinions. I hope it rolls out to many more schools in future, to give lots of other people this same opportunity.