"Summer is high season for forced marriage and female genital mutilation because children are off from school and many [immigrant] families plan trips to their home countries. We also see that many young people are being left abroad because their parents are afraid that they will become "too" Norwegian," Listhaug said as quoted by Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang.
Minister of Children and Equality and Listhaug's fellow Progress Party member Solveig Horne also voiced concern about children who live under extreme control of parents and are not allowed to go out or themselves choose their circle of friends.
"Norwegian parents have complete control of the children, before they let them loose in their teens. For ethnic minority parents, the situation is very often the reverse," she asserted.
Earlier, Czech president Miloš Zeman compared Norway's praxis of seizing children and placing them into foster care to Nazi Germany's Lebensborn adoption system, in which children were forcibly taken into care.