Do You Know South Asian Women Had To Take Virginity Tests At London¡¯s Heathrow Airport In 1970s?

"A man doctor came in. I asked to be seen by a lady doctor, but they said "no". He was wearing rubber gloves and took some medicine out of a tube, put it on some cotton and inserted it into me," a 35-year-old Indian school teacher who was examined at the Heathrow Airport in January 1979 said.

"I have been feeling very bad mentally ever since. I was very embarrassed and upset. I had never had a gynaecological examination before," the unidentified woman told The Guardian.

Alamy

What happened?

At least 80 women from India and Pakistan hoping to emigrate to Britain to marry were intimately examined by immigration staff to "check their marital status" via 'virginity tests', according to confidential Home Office files of the UK government.

"He was wearing rubber gloves and took some medicine out of a tube and, put it on some cotton and inserted it into me. He said he was deciding whether I was pregnant now or had been pregnant before. I said that he could see that without doing anything to me, but he said there was no need to get shy. I have been feeling very bad mentally ever since. I was very embarrassed and upset. I had never had a gynaecological examination before," the woman whose story brought these incidents to light told The Guardian.

Another woman still remembers the day she arrived in the UK from Pakistan like it was yesterday. Like many men from the subcontinent, her husband was already living and working in the UK, a doctor in the NHS. Immigration rules meant she had been forced to wait a year before she was allowed to join him.

She stood in the immigration queue at Heathrow, impatient to get through and finally join her husband. Then, right there in the airport, at the order of UK immigration officials, she was subjected to a virginity test.

"They took me to a room. They asked me to undress and made me lie down, and then they did it," she said. It happened 35 years ago.

AP

Why were these tests conducted?

Under the Immigration Act 1971, women joining their fianc¨¦s in the UK who were to be married within three months of entering did not have to get visas; however, wives joining their husbands would be subjected to long waiting lists to obtain their visas. Suspicion from the government that women were claiming to be unmarried to avoid these waiting lists led to the implementation of virginity testing.

Even internal Home Office papers from the time show that the immigration officer at Heathrow justified the order for a "virginity test" on suspicions that the tested teacher might already be married, given her age and the fact that she was travelling with her fiance. If they were already married, she would have needed a visa.

When and where did it happen?

The practice was banned in February 1979, a month after it was reported the Indian teacher was examined by a male doctor when she arrived at London's Heathrow Airport to test whether she was a genuine wife-to-be who had not borne children.

This came as calls had been made for the Government to make an official apology after it was discovered the intimate examinations ¨C used to 'check the marital status' of Indian and Pakistani women - were on a wider scale than originally thought.

Who were subjected to the test?

A few other young Pakistani women, who had also been on her flight, were similarly taken aside for tests. "They were only asking the women who were travelling on their own to go to one side," the woman said. "It was embarrassing, and also, it felt a little shameful."

Why was it wrong on many levels?

Being forced to prove whether or not you are a virgin is degrading, humiliating and belittling. It happens in other parts of the world to some women on their wedding nights, when in-laws demand to see a blood-stained sheet the morning after; it happens in some Zulu tribes; and it occurred in 2011 during the Tahrir Square protests when the Egyptian army rounded up 18 women, strip-searched them and then checked whether they had yet had sex.

The immigration policy of the 1970s only marked a deeper entrenchment of this sentiment of "undesirability" and ousting, now imposed on South Asian immigrant women.

The policy assumed that South Asian marriages were a sham, contracted solely to gain entry to Britain and otherwise facilitate immigration unless proved otherwise. Those seeking to enter and their partners seeking to sponsor them were categorised as potential liars and "bogus fianc¨¦es".

This was legitimised by the racist ideology of the state, expressed by Margaret Thatcher, then opposition leader, who described Britain as 'being swamped by people of a different culture'.

In August 2022, the British government made a monumental step forward ¨C criminalising virginity testing and hymenoplasty. Through the passing of The Health and Care Act 2022, the British government outlawed the practice of testing virginity for the first time, exercising both territorial and extraterritorial jurisdiction and rendering it illegal to carry out, offer, or aid and abet virginity testing or hymenoplasty in any part of the UK ¨C or for any UK national or resident to do these things outside of the UK.

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