About Dame Jasvinder Sanghera
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- About Dame Jasvinder Sanghera
- Biography & Background
About Dame Jasvinder Sanghera
I left home as a teenager rather than submit to a forced marriage. In choosing my own future, I was disowned by my family.
My sister Robina was also forced into a marriage and later tragically took her own life. Her death changed the course of mine.
In 1993, I founded Karma Nirvana in Robina’s memory. What began in my front room grew into a national charity and a movement that helped bring forced marriage and honour-based abuse out from behind closed doors and into public consciousness.
For more than three decades, I have worked alongside survivors, challenged governments and institutions, influenced policy and practice, and spoken about issues too often hidden by silence, shame and fear.
I am a best-selling author of Shame and Daughters of Shame, and my writing continues today through Diary of a Disowned Woman, where I explore some of the more personal parts of life — family, disownment, grief, relationships, identity, resilience and finding your own voice.
- Current Roles & Focus
My Work Today
Today, I continue to champion survivor voice and challenge institutions where change is needed.
I serve as Independent Survivor Advocate for survivors harmed by Mohammed Al Fayed and as an Independent Panel Member of the Home Office Domestic Homicide Review Quality Assurance Panel.
Alongside my advocacy and public work, I am training as a psychotherapist, with a particular interest in children and young people. For me, this feels like a natural extension of a career spent listening to lived experience and seeking to understand the impact of trauma, relationships and the systems around us.
I continue to speak, write, campaign and provide independent advice on survivor engagement, safeguarding and institutional accountability.
CAMPAIGNING & CHANGE
I have never been interested in speaking about injustice simply for the sake of being heard. I speak because I believe things can and should change.
My campaigning continues to evolve in response to the issues and injustices I encounter. I use lived experience, survivor voice and evidence to challenge policy and practice where systems are failing people.
One of my current areas of focus is grandparents and family relationships. I am campaigning for greater recognition of the importance of safe, loving relationships between children and their grandparents, and for a family justice system that better understands the emotional impact on children when important relationships are disrupted.
I am also increasingly focused on what individual safeguarding cases can teach us about wider failures in policy and practice, particularly when institutions knew, or should have known, that a child or survivor was at risk.
The issues I campaign on may change. I will continue to raise the things I care about, as well as those brought to my attention by others — speaking out when people are not being heard, when systems fail them and when change is needed.
BEYOND THE PUBLIC WORK
My public work is only part of who I am.
- I am a mother and grandmother, roles that mean more to me than any title or honour.
- I am also the devoted owner of Otis, my Labrador, who has absolutely no interest in titles, policies or meetings and is probably all the better for it!
- I love writing, being near the sea and the quieter moments of life.
- After a lifetime of being told who I should be, perhaps the greatest freedom has been learning that I can simply be myself.
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT DAME JASVINDER?
Listen to Jasvinder on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs
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