Forced marriages are not a culturally sensitive issue but an abhorrent act, a Tory Muslim peer has said.

Baroness Warsi, shadow minister for community cohesion and social action, has called for such marriages to be treated as crimes to send a clear signal that they are intolerable.

She said the same arguments had been previously used to tackle domestic violence.

Speaking on GMTV programme, she said that society had realised that domestic violence was not a taboo subject and that what was needed now was for the state to step in to give protection against forced marriages. "As a society we draw a line in the sand," she said.

Baroness Warsi continued: "This is not a culturally sensitive issue, this is an abhorrent act which we must stand together on..."

On Monday she told peers: "We did make domestic violence a crime and we put down a benchmark that this is intolerable. Is it not now time to make forced marriages a criminal offence, to say very clearly that this will not be tolerated and people will be prosecuted for committing this offence?"

Home Office minister Lord West of Spithead replied: "The difficulty is that these things happen in families. We have taken a lot of advice and talked to many people.

"There is a feeling that the crime would go even further underground because people generally do not want to put their families through this."

He said that "because it was made a crime", the cases of domestic violence dropped from 814,000 in 1997 to 407,000 in 2006/7.

The BBC reported that the Government's forced marriage unit investigates about 300 cases a year - but a Home Office-funded study suggests that sort of number may be happening every year in the town of Luton alone.