Forced Marriage and 'Honour' Killings in Britain

Private Lives, Community Crimes and Public Policy Perspectives

Christina Julios

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317134169
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the contemporary phenomenon of forced marriage and 'honour' killings in Britain. Set against a background of increasing 'honour'-based violence within the country's South Asian and Muslim Diasporas, the book traces the development of the 'honour' question over the past two decades. It accordingly witnesses unprecedented changes in public awareness and government policy including ground-breaking 'honour'-specific legislation and the criminalisation of forced marriage. All of which makes Britain an important context for the study of this now indigenous and self-perpetuating social problem. In considering the scale of the challenge and its underlying causes, attention is paid to the intersections of gendered power structures that disadvantage female members of 'honour' cultures as well as feminist theories that seek to explain them. The book features five key case-studies of 'honour' killings and draws from a wide range of narratives including those of 'honour' violence survivors, grassroots service providers and legislators. Such myriad of perspectives reveals the complexity of the 'honour' issue and the deep ideological divisions that characterise it. With the UK's multiculturalist discourse unable to reconcile protecting patriarchal minority cultures with safeguarding gender equality and human rights, the book raises fundamental questions about the country's future direction. Following a long trend of state-sponsored integrationist policies, the government's response to the 'honour' question points decisively in the direction of a post-multicultural British nation.

PART I
Private Lives

Chapter 1
Introduction: British Multiculturalism, ‘Honour’ Violence and Gender Inequality

Britain’s ‘Honour’ Violence Landscape

On Easter Sunday 2012, national newspapers’ headlines reported how a five-year-old girl had become ‘Britain’s youngest known victim of forced marriage’ (Bingham, 2012; Lakhani, 2012; Doughty, 2012; Taneja, 2012). She was ‘among 400 children dealt with by the Home Office’s dedicated Forced Marriage Unit [FMU]’ the previous year (Bingham, 2012). At the time, amid the press coverage of the child bride, an interview with a former five-year-old spouse called Samina (assumed name) also featured in the news (Baig, 2012: 2G). Given the timing of Samina’s story, her experience serves to illustrate the plight of vulnerable young girls and women in Britain at risk of being forced into marriage.

At home, in the midst of an English northern town, Samina had been dressing up in a new outfit for what she thought was a birthday party; instead she was wedded off in an arranged marriage having barely turned five. Although decades have now passed since the ceremony took place, Baig notes how it ‘effectively ended her childhood and paved the way for years of abuse’ (Baig, 2012: 2G). As Samina explains:

I was denied the right of childhood, play and innocence. When you are married at the age of five you no longer live like a normal child. I was deprived of my basic human rights. (Samina cited in Baig, 2012: 2G)

Discouraged from pursuing education, Samina was removed from school aged 13. On her fourteenth birthday, ‘a formal wedding service was held, marking the bride’s transition from her parents’ home to the home of her husband’ (Baig, 2012: 2G). The next two years would be spent in Pakistan, where ‘the marriage was consummated against her will after she suffered a horrific beating’ (Baig, 2012: 2G). Back in England, Samina gave birth to a daughter at the age of 20 and went on to develop Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Defying the wishes of her husband, she subsequently managed to return to education and finally left him, aged 37. Nowadays a business entrepreneur in her early forties, Samina still ponders why she became a child bride:

I don’t know exactly why I was married off at such a young age, but it was all to do with maintaining traditions and making sure we didn’t question anything. (Samina cited in Baig, 2012: 2G)

Samina’s case is by no means an isolated incident or the first of its kind in the UK, but as the literature suggests (Hansard, 2011a; Brandon and Hafez, 2008; Khanum, 2008; CPS, 2008; Samad and Eade, 2002), it is the tip of a rather large and elusive iceberg, with thousands of young minority ethnic women and girls believed to be routinely promised in marriage from birth. ‘People will be horrified’ Jasvinder Sanghera remarks ‘that a five-year-old girl in Britain could enter into a marriage’ (Sanghera, 2012: 2G). Promised herself in matrimony whilst still a minor by her Indian-born Sikh parents, a teenaged Sanghera ran away from their Derby family home to escape the impending nuptials. She still recalls the moment her mother told the then school girl that she was to get married:

I came home from school, I was fourteen. My mother sat me down and she presented this photograph to me. And she said ‘Jasvinder, this is the man you are going to marry’. And I said ‘but mum, I want to finish school’. She said ‘no; where you are going, you don’t need an education. You are going to get married’. (Sanghera featured in BBC Panorama, 2012)

Sanghera’s experience is a familiar one for many young girls and women who have found themselves at the receiving end of their parent’s unilateral choice of prospective husbands. In an almost identical scene as the one Sanghera described earlier, Sarbjit Kaur Athwal (2013) recalls how her father told the then teenager about the man he had chosen to marry her:

it came as a shock when, one evening … Dad pushed an envelope to me across the dining table. Inside was a small photograph of a man I’d never seen before.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked.

Dad smiled.

‘That’s the man you’re going to marry’. (Athwal, 2013: 59)

Reflecting now on Samina’s case, Sanghera notes ‘Sadly, I am not at all surprised. Alongside many others, her [Samina’s] life was mapped out before her. Her life was not her own to live but for others to take’ (Sanghera, 2012: 2G). Karma Nirvana, the support group founded by the author of Shame and Daughters of Shame (Sanghera, 2007, 2009) in 1993, deals with similar cases of forced marriage on a daily basis including hundreds of ‘honour’ violence victims every year; with the ‘Honour Network’ Helpline having received 22,000 calls between April 2008 – when it was launched – and June 2012 (Karma Nirvana, 2012). The Association of Chief Police Officers’ (ACPO) own reported estimates indicate that up to 17,000 females in Britain are exposed to ‘honour’ related abuse each year, including ‘girls falling victims of forced marriage, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder by relatives intend on upholding the “honour” of their family’ (Brady, 2008: 8). In 2008, ACPO’s ‘Honour Based Violence Strategy’ stated:

On average, to the best of our knowledge, 12 people are murdered every year for transgressing someone else’s perverted notions of honour. We do not know how many commit suicide as an alternative or an escape. We know that around 500 men and women report to us every year their fear of being forced into marriage, or their experience of rape, assault, false imprisonment and much more as the consequence of being in a marriage without their consent. (ACPO, 2008: 4)

Although ‘honour’ violence is inflicted upon both male and females, young girls and women remain by and large the main targets. In 2012, for instance, out of the 1,485 cases where the government’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) gave ‘advice or support related to a possible forced marriage’, ‘82% involved female victims and 18% involved male victims’ (FMU, 2012). This book therefore focuses on the experiences and accounts of females at the receiving end of ‘honour’ transgressions. As for the narratives of male victims and perpetrators of ‘honour’ crimes, there is some literature that provides partial insights into these largely under-researched groups (Onal, 2008).

In line with mainstream violence against women, a combination of unavailable ‘standardised data’, ‘significant under-reporting’ and reluctance by victims to come forward for ‘fears of retribution’ is broadly understood to account for a continuing lack of ‘honour’ related evidence across the board (Hansard, 2008: 6; Brady, 2008: 8). While relevant government departments, criminal justice agencies and grassroots women’s groups collect their own statistics, a clear national picture is yet to emerge. In 2008, Commander Steve Allen, lead officer of ACPO’s ‘Honour Based Violence Strategy’, noted how the police and the Home Office’s FMU may typically share about 500 cases between them during the course of a year, with the actual toll of ‘honour’-based violence believed to be much higher than official figures suggests (Allen cited in Brady, 2008: 8). In his own estimation ‘If the generally accepted statistic is that a victim will suffer 35 experiences of domestic violence before they report, then I suspect if you multiplied our reporting by 35 times you may be somewhere near where people’s experience [of “honour” violence] is at’ (Allen cited in Brady, 2008: 8). Six years earlier, Baroness Amos, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), had highlighted this seemingly intractable problem: ‘we are working with the cases that have come to our attention, but we believe that we only see a small proportion of the total number of cases’ (Amos, 2002). At the time, the FCO acknowledged the challenges faced when seeking to obtain accurate figures on the real extent of ‘honour’ violence in Britain. In its Annual Report to the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the FCO stated:

We have dealt with approximately 250 cases in the past year … But despite … increased awareness, we are conscious that we deal with only a fraction of the total number of cases. As with domestic violence and child abuse, the nature of the problem of forced marriage makes it extremely difficult to quantify; in many cases victims will never speak out. We know that the police in West Yorkshire alone deal with around 200 cases per year, and that NGOs [Non-Governmental Organisations] working in this area deal with a similar number … Some media reports have suggested that there are over 1000 cases per year in the UK. We fear that the true number may be even higher. (Hansard, 2002a: paras 11–12)

At the time of writing, we are not significantly closer to an overall figure; but a more comprehensive picture is gradually emerging as increased awareness, higher reporting rates and new evidence continue to fill the gaps in our existing knowledge. In 2010, data available from the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on ‘Forced Marriage’ showed that the FMU dealt with 400 cases of forced marriage; while the figure of recorded instances in England reached between 5,000 and 8,000 during the previous year (Hansard, 2011a: 3–4).

It is partly this incomplete picture of the British ‘honour’ violence landscape that makes the UK an important context for the study of such phenomenon. Over the past two decades, furthermore, the issue of ‘honour’ violence has steadily made its way onto the British government’s public policy agenda. A combination of prominent media reporting of forced marriage and ‘honour’ killing cases, increased levels of public awareness aided by high profile lobbying and campaigning have led to unprecedented government interventions, including the introduction of new legislation. All of which renders the UK an ever more relevant contemporary setting for the study of this now indigenous and self-perpetuating social problem. Against this background, the book aims to provide as full a picture as possible of the extent of ‘honour’ transgressions in Britain, in particular those situated at the most extreme end of the violence against women spectrum, that is, forced marriage and ‘honour’ killings. In doing so the volume unveils the many layers of this seemingly intractable issue, while mapping out the geography of ‘honour’ practices, recalling the experiences of ‘honour’ victims and survivors as well as following the development of policy initiatives aimed at tackling ‘honour’ crimes. Underlying them all, the book considers an array of contrasting views, perspectives and theoretical approaches that strive to make sense of multicultural Britain’s very own ‘honour’ violence conundrum.

Defining ‘Honour’ Violence

So-called ‘honour’ transgressions are largely viewed as a form of ‘gender-based violence’ in terms of ‘who commits it, who experiences it, and why’ (Begikhani et al., 2010: 15). The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and ACPO share a generic definition of ‘honour’ violence that conceptualises such offences as fundamental violations of human rights. ‘Honour’ violence is accordingly understood as ‘a crime or incident, which has or may have been committed to protect or defend the honour of the family and/or community’ (CPS, 2013). ‘Honour’ offences therefore comprise a whole scale of behaviour designed to coerce individuals into submission, often ranging from abduction, captivity, physical harm and rape to emotional blackmail, verbal threats and psychological mistreatment.

The conceptualisation of this type of domestic abuse as a culturally based practice is disputed in the literature, with some observers viewing the ‘honour’ terminology as misguided (Gill and Anitha, 2011; Thiara and Gill, 2010). Welchman and Hossain, on the other hand, have described ‘honour’ transgressions as manifestations both of violence against women as well as patriarchal cultural practices; ‘crimes of honour’ consequently encompass:

a variety of manifestations of violence against women, including ‘honour killings’, assault, confinement or imprisonment, and interference with choice in marriage, where the publicly articulated ‘justification’ is attributed to a social order claimed to require the preservation of a concept of ‘honour’ vested in male (family and/or conjugal) control over women and specially women’s sexual conduct: actual, suspected or potential. (Welchman and Hossain, 2005: 4)

Four main categories of ‘honour’ infringements have been commonly identified, namely: forced marriage, ‘honour’ killings, domestic violence and female genital mutilation (Brandon and Hafez, 2008; Khanum, 2008; Welchman and Hossain, 2005). Given the scope of this book, only the first two types of ‘honour’ violence will be considered here, with domestic violence understood as an inherent part both of forced marriage and ‘honour’ killings.

Despite evidence of a significant ‘honour’ violence problem in Britain, the actual extent of the challenge remains unknown; partly due to the difficulties associated with the reporting and measuring of this phenomenon. What it is known however is that ‘honour’ crimes in the UK are on the increase. A Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the UK-based Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) revealed that in 2010 ‘more than 2800 incidents of “honour”-based violence were reported to police across the UK’ (IKWRO, 2011). All 52 police forces across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were asked to disclose recorded incidents of ‘honour’ violence during the course of a year. On the whole, ‘39 police forces responded with a total of 2823 incidents’, but ‘IKWRO estimates that a further 500 incidents may have been reported to the 13 forces who did not respond’ (IKWRO, 2011). Of the 12 police forces that did provide additional figures for the year 2009, nine ‘showed an increase in “honour” crime between 2009 and 2010’; here ‘The overall increase across the twelve forces was 57%. In London “honour” crime has doubled to more than 5 times the national average, and in Northumberland it has tripled in a year’ (IKWRO, 2011). The top five worst areas affected were listed as follows: London with 495 incidents, followed by the West Midlands (378 incidents), West Yorkshire (350 incidents), Lancashire (227 incidents) and Manchester (189 incidents) (IKWRO, 2011). These figures, IKWRO concludes, ‘demonstrate that “honour”-based violence is not a minor problem but a very serious issue which affects thousands of people each year, many of whom will suffer high levels of abuse before they seek help’ (IKWRO, 2011).

The unabated rate of ‘honour’ violence in Britain has drawn attention to the Diaspora communities where it is found to be most prevalent. Two minority groups above all have come to be widely identified with ‘honour’-based cultural practices, namely: South Asians and Muslims.

An ‘Asian’ and/or a ‘Muslim’ Issue? The Contested Framing of ‘Honour’ Violence

By and large the literature recognises the far-reaching ambit of ‘honour’ violence affecting a wide range of communities and cultures, whilst cutting across age, gender, social strata and ethnic background. In 2007, Hester et al.’s (2007) Home Office-commissioned study into forced marriage in Tower Hamlets, Manchester and Birmingham identified a variety of population groups where forced marriage was seen as taking place, including South Asian (over 54 per cent), African (over 49 per cent), Middle Eastern (over 21 per cent), Latin American (over 8 per cent) and Muslim (43 per cent) (Hester et al., 2007: 24). To a lesser extent forced marriage was also identified among Eastern Europeans, Albanians, Chinese, Jewish, and some Christian denominations such as Mormon and Greek Orthodox (Hester et al., 2007: 24). The geography of forced marriage cases dealt by the FMU similarly spans 60 different nations including South Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Eastern European countries (FMU, 2012). Amy Cumming, Joint Head of the FMU, has accordingly indicated that forced marriage ‘affects many communities and cultures’ including both white and non-white ethnic groups (FCO, 2012a).

Notwithstanding the recognised breadth of the ‘honour’ violence phenomenon, evidence also suggest a prevalence of ‘honour’ crimes among South Asian and Muslim communities both in the UK and abroad. In Britain, figures from the FMU recording forced marriage cases by country of origin provide a case in point, with almost half of the cases (47.1 per cent) involving Pakistan followed by Bangladesh (11 per cent), India (8 per cent), Afghanistan (2.1 per cent), Somalia, Turkey and Iraq (over 1 per cent each) (FMU, 2012). In other words, over 66 per cent of forced marriage instances dealt with by the FMU pertain to individuals from Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian origin alone; whereas ‘Asian or British Asian’ communities account for less than 6 per cent of the total population in England and Wales (ONS, 2011: 6). In the same way, ‘honour’ killings in Britain over the past two decades, including the high profile cases featured in this book together with the many more instances reported in the press, as well as actual murder trials, have also disproportionally involved South Asian and Muslim perpetrators.

The UK ‘honour’ violence national picture is in turn replicated at international level. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that ‘Throughout the world, perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are murdered by members of their own families’; such occurrences have been reported in countries as far apart as ‘Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Sweden, Turkey, Uganda and the United Kingdom’ (UNFPA, 2000). Gill likewise notes how ‘patterns of family honour killings and violence are evident in Latin American and Mediterranean societies, various European cultures, communities in many countries of the Middle East and parts of South Asia, and in some migrant communities, including … several in the UK and other Western countries’ (Gill 2010 cited in Begikhani et al., 2010: 16). Yet the same international indicators point markedly towards the South Asian (and neighbouring regions) as the global geographical epicentre of ‘honour’ transgressions, and members of the Muslim community as the main perpetrators. The UNFPA has accordingly singled out South and Western Asia together with North Africa as the world’s territories where ‘honour’ killings predominantly take place; with ‘At least 1,000 women’ having been ‘murdered in Pakistan in 1999’ (UNFPA, 2000). In the same way, the Kurdish region of Iraq and Turkey has among the highest rates of ‘honour’-based violence in the world and especially honour killings per capita recorded (Brandon and Hafez, 2008: 54). The UN estimates that as many as 1,000 women in Iraqi Kurdistan may be killed by their families every year (UN Security Council, 2006). In 2000, Asma Jahangir, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, went as far as to say that:

The practice of ‘honour killings’ is more prevalent although not limited to countries where the majority of the population is Muslim. In this regard it should be noted that a number of renowned Islamic leaders and scholars have publicly condemned this practice and clarified that it has no religious basis. At the same time, it is reported that some Governments of countries where Muslims are in a minority do not take a firm position against such violations of human rights on the pretext of not wanting to hurt cultural sensitivities among the minority population. (UN Economic and Social Council, 2000: para. 78: 27)

Against this background, ‘honour’ violence has often come to be framed as a mainly ‘South Asian’ and/or a ‘Muslim’ specific issue. In the UK context, Gangoli et al. explain how ‘currently available data from the Forced Marriage Unit indicates that forced marriage is prevalent in all South Asian communities … However, there is a general ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I: Private Lives
• Part II: Public Policy Perspectives
• Part III: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index