Over the Christmas period, some teenage girls will have been promised a holiday to their parents’ homeland. They will have arrived to find it is not a holiday, but a betrothal and a rape. This is not a “cultural” inevitability, but often a naked bid by the groom for British citizenship. And the UK must stop targeting victims.

When police in Somaliland raided a “correctional school” in 2017, they found 25 young women from the US and Europe who had been incarcerated there for a year and horrifically tortured. Some were beaten for reciting the Koran in imperfect Arabic. Their parents chose this fate to prevent them from becoming too westernised and to force them into marriage.

Yet the outrage has been directed not at the families, but at the UK government. The Foreign Office rescued 27 such victims from abroad in 2017. Unfortunately, it turns out that it has been charging many of them the costs of their repatriation. Four of the British girls found in the Somalian correctional school were charged ￡740 each. Some have been struggling, unsurprisingly, to pay the money back. Insult has been added to injury, tarnishing the heroic efforts of police and officials who found and freed them, and loading pressure on to charities such as Southall Black Sisters, which helps ethnic minorities escape domestic violence and other kinds of abuse.