We have become complicit in this epidemic of abuse and violence by not doing more to challenge it.
By Sunny Hundal
The murder of the teenager Shafilea Ahmed is likely to stand out in
British history as a particularly gruesome example of what we now refer
to as "honour killings". Shafilea had warned that her parents were
trying to marry her off to Pakistan; others knew she had sustained
injuries from beatings by her parents; she had even tried to commit
suicide in Pakistan. But right until the end, her own life was fated to
be out of her control - she went missing in 2003 and her dismembered
body was found a year later.
Shafilea's case wasn't a one-off. It took eight years for the
murderers of the Sikh woman Surjit Athwal - her own husband and
mother-in-law - to be brought to justice in 2007. It took ten years for
Mehmet Goren to be jailed, in 2009, for murdering his daughter Tulay,
because she fell in love with an older man of a different Muslim sect.
Last year Gurmeet Singh Ubhi was found guilty of murdering his 24 year
old daughter Amrit because the Sikh girl was dating a white man. There
are others too - Heshu Yones, Banaz Mahmod, Nuziat Khan - the list of
women murdered in the UK over their "honour" is depressingly long.
Any decent person would be angry and sad when presented with these
names. But it isn't enough to be sad: we have become complicit in this
epidemic of abuse and violence by not doing more to challenge it. This
should be a left-wing cause célèbre but instead there is an embarrassed
silence. Left-wing activists robustly challenge racism and homophobia -
so why isn't more being done to stand up to this social evil?
Perhaps it's because forced marriages and honour killings are
fundamentally about a lack of cultural integration. They almost always
happen when parents want to stop their daughters from mixing with
British culture and life, instead of abiding by outdated cultural
traditions. To these parents, mixing with other cultures or ethnicities
has become synonymous with losing the "family honour."
In the past, most left-wing intellectuals and activists avoided the
issue of cultural integration for good reason: it was usually a
code-word for assimilation and conjured up images of whites telling
others their way of life was inferior. But caught between attacks from
the right on multiculturalism, and worries that speaking out would look
racist, we have become paralysed. Meanwhile, these problems are set to
get worse as more second and third generation children of immigrants
come of age.
The Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (Ikwro) found
last year that 39 out of 52 police forces across the UK had recorded at
least 2,823 "honour" attacks over 2010. Some forces showed a jump of
nearly 50 per cent in such cases from 2009. Horrifying stories of
friends subjected to subjected to verbal abuse by parents for straying
past cultural boundaries are far too common. One acquaintance of mine,
under pressure to marry before she was ready, was repeatedly told she
was being "too fussy" and would end up "left behind on the shelf". Her
self-confidence was broken down with every barbed comment until she
eventually gave in. Emotional blackmail is one thing, but the Crown
Prosecution Service estimates that on average one girl is murdered every
month in Britain over "family honour" - while the number of forced
marriages could be as high as 10,000 a year.
Jagdeesh Athwal, who fought for nearly a decade to get justice for his sister Surjit, told the Independent
that Asian community leaders and religious groups "remain deafeningly
silent when these killings happen". The author Sufiya Ahmed, whose book, Secrets of the Henna Girl,
is about forced marriages, admits there is "a lot of denial" about the
problem. "Aside from not wanting to acknowledge that it happens, there
are even those who argue that the subject shouldn't even be talked about
for fear of branding all Asians with the same brush."
There is a patronising attitude at work here, too: well-meaning
liberals have been known to assume forced marriages and such abuse are
an inherent part of Asian culture and therefore must be left alone. A
few months ago, activist Jasvinder Sanghera's charity Karma Nirvana
convinced a teacher in East London to put up posters at the school that
said: "Forced Marriage is Abuse Not Cultural". But the posters were
taken down and the charity was told the head was concerned they would
upset Muslim parents.
A reluctance to offend will only encourage more silence. If
self-appointed community leaders won't speak out, then Labour
politicians and left-wing activists have a duty to. I'm not calling
for a sneering attitude that says, "if you want to be British, you have
to integrate into our way of life". Instead, we need an inclusive
narrative about integration which is clear that we, as Britons, are
equal regardless of religion, ethnicity or background. It has to appeal
to both white and non-white Britons. It has to be about what it means to
live in this country collectively and what we do tolerate as a society
and what we don't. It would give us more confidence to stop the
systematic abuse of thousands of women in Britain. Otherwise, we stay
complicit in their fate.
Lost in Sweden: A Kurdish Daughter Is Sacrificed
By Sarah Lyall
UPPSALA, Sweden — For a while, Fadime Sahindal
seemed an ideal symbol of second-generation immigrant success in a
country that prides itself on its openness and tolerance.
She spoke fluent Swedish, had a Swedish boyfriend
and believed that foreigners should adapt to Swedish culture. Last year,
she spoke passionately in Parliament about the difficulties of being a
young Turkish woman pressing for Western-style independence against the
wishes of her deeply traditional parents.
But it was this very desire for independence that
provoked her father into a rage so great that he killed her in January,
turning her into the tragic emblem of a European society's failure to
bridge the gap in attitudes between its own culture and those of its
newer arrivals.
As Sweden prepares for national elections this fall
at a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiments across Europe, the case
has hardened many Swedes' attitudes toward non-Nordic immigrants, who
make up about 9 percent of the population. Right-wing parties want to
require immigrants to conform more thoroughly to Swedish customs with
language lessons, citizenship tests and the like.
"It's hard to say what Swedish society should do,"
said Marianne Broddesson, the treasurer of Terrafem, a support network
for immigrant women. "It has to do with the whole social situation in
the country, and it's very, very complicated. It has to do with
segregation, doesn't it — with people who don't want to enter into
Swedish society, and who don't realize that their kids are growing up
here. But how do you tell people to become more Swedish?" By all
accounts, Fadime's father, Rahmi Sahindal, had little interest in
becoming Swedish. Originally from a small Kurdish village, he moved to
Sweden with his family in search of better prospects when Fadime, one of
five daughters and one son, was 11.
Neither he nor his wife learned to speak Swedish.
Instead, they clung hard to their Kurdish identity, living as part of a
patriarchal clan of some 400 emigrants from the same region. Authority
was vested in a network of male relatives, and the concept of honor — to
the family, and to tradition — was all-important. The wishes of
individuals, and especially women, were considered far less significant
than the wishes of the group's elders.
Fadime's two older sisters both married first
cousins from back home. But Fadime (pronounced fa-DEE-meh), as she is
universally known in Sweden now, refused to enter into such an
arrangement. Instead, in the late 90's, she secretly began dating a
Swede named Patrick.
But her father, who worked in a dry cleaner's, once
saw the couple holding hands, and exploded with anger. "Fadime said she
knew from that instant that she could never live with her family again,
that she could never be secure again," said Leiff Ericksson, one of
Sweden's best-known lawyers, who represented Fadime after her father
threatened her. She moved north, returning home only to fetch her
possessions under police escort. Her father — and her brother, who now hated her with
all-consuming passion, family members say — continued to threaten her
over the telephone. She went to the authorities, who decided to
prosecute.
The case received a great deal of publicity, and the
trial became the subject of a television documentary. Television
cameras recorded, too, how Mesud Sihandal, Fadime's brother, tried to
attack her during a break in the trial. The father was ordered to pay a
fine; the brother, 17, got a suspended jail sentence.
Fadime now prepared to defy her family again, by
returning from the north to move in with her boyfriend, Patrick. But in a
sad twist to a very sad tale, Patrick was killed in a car accident two
weeks after the trial ended. Initial suspicions that his car had been
tampered with proved unfounded.
"You can understand Fadime's feelings now — she was
like glass," Mr. Ericksson said. Several days later, her brother
attacked her in an Uppsala street, beating her so badly that she was
taken to the hospital in an ambulance. In the subsequent trial, Mesud,
who had a criminal record, testified in court that Fadime was "a whore."
"I asked him in court, `You say that Fadime has
dishonored the family, and what have you done — you have stolen and used
drugs,' " Mr. Ericksson said. " `Doesn't that dishonor your family?'
And he said, `I've broken your rules, but Fadime has broken our rules,
and our rules are much more important.' "
Mesud was sentenced to six months in prison, and
Fadime moved north again. But relations with her family were irreparably
damaged.
Her father said, " `She has destroyed so much for
us, and we are so ashamed,' " said Nalin Pekgul, a Kurdish member of the
Swedish Parliament, who befriended Fadime and tried to make peace
between her and her parents. "He thought his life was finished because
wherever he went, people gossiped about him. He kept saying, `I have no
life. I wish I was dead now.' "
Mrs. Pekgul brokered an agreement where Fadime's
father pledged not to harm her, as long as she stayed away from the news
media and from Uppsala. "He told me all the time, `I don't want her to
come back to Uppsala, because my son will kill her, and I don't want to
lose two children,' " Mrs. Pekgul said.
Fadime agreed never to speak publicly again,
pursuing her work instead in the youth wing of the Social Democratic
Party. But her parents' hard-heartedness crushed her. Her main family
ally was her younger sister Songul, a fragile young woman who has been
plagued by psychiatric problems for most of her 24 years. The sisters
spoke often, and it was at Songul's Uppsala apartment that Fadime was
murdered.
At least three people saw Rahmi Sihandal shoot his
26-year-old daughter that January day — Fadime's mother, a teenage
sister and Songul — but only Songul tried to help Fadime, performing CPR
while blood poured from her sister's ears, nose and mouth.
"At the hospital, the doctors said that Fadime was
dead," Mr. Ericksson related. "At that point, one of her older sisters
phones a male member of the family, in Songul's presence, and says, `The
whore is dead now.' "
Songul, too, was the only one willing to press
charges and to testify in court against her father. She had a breakdown
after that, and is now being treated at a psychiatric hospital in
Uppsala. In a telephone interview from the hospital, she said what
infuriated her family most was Fadime's decision to speak to the news
media.
"They were so angry when she was on television, when
she wanted to talk about the family crisis," Songul said. "But she
wanted to do it not for herself, but for other girls, for everybody who
has to live that sort of life."
Life has not gone well for Fadime's family since her
death. Her father is in jail, sentenced to life imprisonment. Her
mother, shattered, has moved back to Kurdistan.
Songul, Fadime's beloved sister, feels betrayed — by
the news media, which she believes sensationalized her sister's story;
by her family, which refuses to acknowledge her; and by the Swedish
government, which she believes should have helped her parents more.
"My dad is a victim of this, too," she said. "I think he loved Fadime, in a strange way."
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