It's a riotous and colourful ceremony in Northern
England, a Pakistani Muslim wedding. The nerves are on show from the groom, Usman, as tradition
collides with the new. As is custom, bride to be Nagina sits in a
separate room, and Imam Irfan Chishti asks three times if she's marrying of her own free
will. "I have to ask you, under no force, no pressure,
do you Nagina... No pressure, despite Mum and Dad sitting alongside,
and a phalanx of cameras hired to capture every precious moment. Marriage is a pact between freely consenting
and equal partners -- something most would take for granted in 21st century Britain - and
yet as the ceremony unfolds, Imam Chishti stresses the point about women's rights.
"But if the lady, if the bride, if the woman, if the wife, if she says no then it ain't
happenin'. If she'd had turned round and said to me I'm not happy for this wedding to take
place, then it doesn't matter how much has been spent on this afternoon, it doesn't matter
what thousands or millions have been spent, that consent of hers is the most important
thing". The wedding of Usman and Nagina certainly
gives every appearance of a happy, mutually agreed union. But for many young British women in the country's
Asian and Middle Eastern communities, that's not the case. Partners are preordained by
parents. A code of behaviour enforced, and if daughters step out of line, consequences
can be severe. "There are probably between eight to ten thousand
forced marriages or threats of forced marriage in the UK every year. We prosecuted more than
two hundred cases last year of honour based violence.
What we have here are crimes in the name of the father, the son and the blessed male members
of the family". "I think people who do these actions know
categorically that what they're doing is religiously wrong.
There isn't a misunderstanding of the faith. What there is, is just themselves trying to
justify their actions through the faith. Perhaps we need to speak out more about it". Violent crime resulting from the honour codes
of ethnic communities is a major problem. British authorities acknowledge they don't
know the true scale of it. "We have kidnappings, abductions, assaults,
sexual offences -- you know, anything that you could imagine could happen does happen
in the name of honour. The most extreme examples are homicide and
we have perhaps ten to twelve of those in the United Kingdom every year which are honour
related". These young British women were murdered in
a perverse attempt to restore family honour. Twenty seven year old Surjit Athwal killed
on the orders of her mother-in-law. Twenty year old Banaz Mahmod, raped and strangled
on the orders of her father and uncle. And seventeen year old Shafilea Ahmed, suffocated
by her parents. Shafilea had rejected her parent's choice
of a Pakistani Muslim husband. She wanted to be a lawyer and to make her own choices.
Her parents decided she was shaming the family, beat her frequently
and finally forced a plastic bag down her throat. Her siblings were made to watch as
a warning to them. Family honour was paramount. When Shafilea's body was found in a river,
her parents put on tearful displays feigning innocence and outrage.
Years later one of Shafilea's sister's smashed the parent's conspiracy by giving evidence
against them and they were sentenced to long jail terms.
Shafilea's repeated pleas for help were ignored, even a suicide attempt failed to convince
police she was in desperate trouble. "She couldn't be any clearer -
and they failed her. And that is the story of many of our victims here in Britain today.
There are many Shafilea Ahmeds out there. When somebody is murdered, for example
-- and we've seen horrific murders here in Britain -- Shafilea Ahmed was one -- there
was a silence in that community. Where was the outcry of people standing up and speaking
out, and saying 'This is wrong.' Nobody is doing this in the name of Islam. You know,
we need to go out there and preach in our communities not to do this to your children.
That doesn't exist. Who is being silent? Who is being...? Silent. Who is being silent?
The people within our communities that are being silent are those who commit these crimes,
those who don't commit these crimes. So good people are turning a blind eye. Our so-called
community leaders. So they exist in the form of a religious leader, a community leader,
a councillor, a politician. They're the people. And the ones who are breaking the silence
are the victims themselves. Organisations like us. We're the ones breaking the silence,
but we do that at a cost. Saturday night in Leeds, one of the biggest
cities with a significant Asian population. Teenagers flock to the city square, having
fun. Many Asian girls don't enjoy these freedoms. Some would even be barred from attending an
event as benign as the annual light show, restricted in what they can wear, whom they
can talk to, where they can go. "These teenagers, born here in Britain,
have a life whereby the only place they have independence and the right to think freely
is in school. As soon as they go home and the front door is closed, it's as if they're
living in some rural part of Pakistan or India even though they're living in Britain".
More than four million people in England identify as Asian, almost eight per cent of the population,
predominantly from South Asia - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In a recent survey of 500 young British people from Asian backgrounds, two-thirds said families
should live according to the concept of honour. Almost one in five said physical punishment
of women was justified for certain behaviours, such as going out at night unaccompanied,
dressing a certain way or wanting to marry a man deemed unacceptable. And six per cent
of the young men surveyed said, under certain circumstances, honour killings could be justified.
Changing deeply entrenched attitudes and practices that subjugate women is not proving easy,
and so law enforcement agencies are developing more sophisticated approaches, starting with
professionals who understand what drives honour crimes.
"At the moment in so many communities, in so many families, it's merely used to suppress
women, to oppress women. They are the only ones that carry the honour on their family.
So if they are perceived to have misbehaved in some way or made their own choices, then
they have dishonoured the family. If men do the same, well it's men. You know, they can
do what they like, and as I said, honour can be good, a force for good -- regrettably it's
been used too often to control women". Nazir Afzal is the chief prosecutor in England's
North West. He's a Muslim who makes a very clear distinction between cultural practices
and crime. "Forced marriage is one of the last forms
of slavery in the world. You can imagine total and utter despair. So many of our victims
of forced marriage will harm themselves - will actually kill themselves
- and that... because that's the only way they can see out of this".
From the law courts to the police beat, there's a growing realisation that some Asian families
and communities have been using their culture as a shield to justify the notion that family
honour can be regained by violence. "That concept exists in every Asiatic mind,
whether they be in Great Britain, whether they be in Switzerland, whether they be in
Pakistan... India -- wherever -- it's a concept. It doesn't stop just because you have crossed
a border". Detective Constable Palbinder Singh is a Sikh
who's helped crack some difficult honour crime cases. I've always advocated to ignore cultural sensitivity. It's a ruse.
'We won't interfere with that family, it's their culture.' Well hang on a minute, crimes
are being committed, people's lives are being destroyed, people's freedoms are being suppressed.
'Oh but that's okay, that's their culture.' Well, have you actually spoken to the people
who've been denied these basic freedoms? And that's the problem with this concept of diversity,
it's now crossing over into political correctness and it's simply not working".
There is this mistaken perception that you know it's culturally acceptable for forced
marriage to happen, and police officers, along with many of the professionals have been scared
to address that issue, which is why we really need to change that mindset and that moral
blindness. How much does a fear of being called racist play into it?
I think it can play a big part. No police officer or any other agency wants to be branded
racist, but that's something we've absolutely got to get past because we just have a clear
duty to protect the victim and safeguard them. Detective Sergeant Trudy Runham of the West
Midlands Police has worked with many victims of honour based violence and tries to educate
other officers. What we do know is that the rate of Asian
females, their suicide rate is three times higher than anybody else. That has been said
to compare only to soldiers' suicide rate coming back from Afghanistan, which obviously
they're coming back from a war zone. So what does that tell you about how these females
in this case are feeling and self-harm is absolutely a key indicator of these issues. It was the horrific killing of Banaz Mahmod
that catapulted honour crime into public consciousness in Britain and exposed the failings of police.
"On the fourth occasion she takes a list and she names the people that are going to kill
her. At the top of there is her father, her uncle, other male members of the family, she
said these are the people that are going to kill me. If anything happens to me, these
are the people who did it". Banaz Mahmod was a young Muslim woman from
an Iraqi Kurd background. She told police her family was planning to kill her because
she'd left an abusive arranged marriage and was seen kissing a man outside a tube station.
Months later, lying in a hospital emergency room, she explained how her father had tried
to kill her. "And she was still not believed. She was dealt
with as being melodramatic, fantasising". Jasvinder Sanghera knows the horrors of honour
violence. She knows that Banaz Mahmod should have been saved and she needs these trainee
detectives to know where police went wrong. "Would you believe her? As a professional
the response was surely not. You're not going to be killed for being seen kissing a boy".
Just a month later, the twenty year old was dead. She'd been raped, garrotted, her body
packed in a suitcase. Her uncle and father were convicted of ordering
the killing. Banaz's sister Bekhal gave evidence against them. "And all I could say is devilish...
that's all I could say... nothing good. How could somebody
think that kind of thing, and actually do it to their own flesh and blood?
Jasvinder Sanghera has a strong sense of the suffering of Banaz and other victims because
she narrowly escaped a forced marriage and now campaigns against it.
She was the sixth of seven daughters, plus a much favoured son, raised in a close-knit
Sikh community. "This is the house that I grew up in and yeah
this is the wall me and my sisters used to sit on. My dad would be standing at the fence
having his crafty cigarettes. Today, looking at the house, I see nothing
but pain in honesty. It's really an empty shell for me now". Jasvinder Sanghera describes a claustrophobic
upbringing where girls lived by strict rules or were claimed to bring shame on their family.
One by one she saw her older sisters married off, at about fourteen or fifteen years of
age. "I watched at least three of my sisters being taken out of school and then being taken
abroad to marry a stranger. They'd disappear. They'd come back as somebody's wife. Their
appearance changed. They'd wear a wedding ring on their finger
and nobody was seeing this as abnormal, it was just a normality". When her sisters complained of beatings by
their husbands, her mother would insist their duty was to stay in the
marriages. Then one day after school, fourteen year old
Jasvinder was shown a photo of the man her parents declared she would marry.
"And then she told me that I was promised to him from the age of eight and I just looked
at her, not taking it seriously. I took an overdose and one of my sisters said
'If you think you're going to get out of it that way, you've got another thing coming'.
Everywhere I turned they were just sending me back in and I felt isolated... suicidal.
I felt completely trapped". "The bedroom there with the window slightly
ajar, is the room where my family locked me in the room there when I said I wouldn't marry
the person. They took me out of school and I was held a prisoner in that room for a long
time". "How long for?""I can't remember the exact time. It was a number of weeks, but
I remember planning my own escape". When she eventually did run away, her mother
said Jasvinder was dead to her. Jasvinder now runs a charity called Karma
Nirvana that tries to prevent honour crimes and supports victims. On a tour through her
old neighbourhood, she worries about girls suffering at the hands of their families,
just like she did. She wants schools to be more alert to the signs, in particular, unexplained
absences. "If you're Asian and missing from education, the same questions are not asked
as the white counterparts here in Britain, and that has not changed because we know there
are hundreds go missing off our school rolls. Maybe they're not being forced into marriage
but the point is, ask the question and look into it. They're not even doing that". What's being recorded as truancy may well be punishment by parents or being sent overseas
to be married much earlier than the legal age in Britain. In 2008 the British Government
reviewed school records to see how many pupils had gone missing.
"They discovered hundreds, hundreds of young girls and by that I mean eleven, twelve, thirteen
year olds who would just disappear off the school rolls".
The prosecutor says no one knows how many of those girls were taken from their country.
"Imagine the fear, you're a British born and bred schoolgirl
and sent to the airport. You know you're being sent to marry a man you've never met, in a
different country. Or maybe you don't know. Many girls think they're going on an exciting
family trip, only to discover the truth later. Many girls go on the school holidays and simply
never return. What about those ones who do suspect? What can they do here, their last
chance to avoid a life not of their own choosing". Police and security are being trained to spot
young women who may be in trouble. Jasvinder Sanghera's son-in-law Anup Manota, represents
the charity Karma Nirvana. His message is that alert officers can save lives and that
sometimes passengers will take desperate measures. So as the last resort we always said the 'spoon
in the knickers' technique... if you have that suspicion and you don't want to go, and
you have that doubt. The idea of hiding a metal object to trigger
security alarms was suggested by a counsellor at the Karma Nirvana help line, advising a
desperate young woman on her way to a forced marriage overseas. "So the call handler said, put a spoon in your knickers, which when you go through security it will go off and at that point you're going to be stopped by a security guard, and say
I'm being forced to marry". "And did she?""Which is exactly what she did and it saved her life". One of the volunteers is Sal, a vision-impaired
Muslim university student. Her desire to leave home for student accommodation led to harassment
and rejection by some members of her family. It's seen as dishonourable, a girl wanting
to do these things, a girl wanting to gain this independence is seen as dishonourable
in Asian families. I mean I don't think what I've done is dishonourable, and you know,
I'm proud of my roots, I'm proud of being Pakistani and I'm proud of my religion. What
I'm not proud of is the way that people kind of manipulate culture and religion and kind
of, and you know, as a result of that sort of honour based violence occurs.
Sal says that despite abuse and forced marriages, many girls choose to stay with their families.
Losing your family is really, really difficult. It's not -- you know, even though I might
be in touch with sort of distant members of my family, often losing that immediate family
is really hard. It's really difficult to cope with.
But one senior Sikh figure says while a huge problem exists, it's not in his community.
It is just a big misunderstanding of who Sikhs are..." Veteran journalist Indarjit Singh,
was appointed to the House of Lords two years ago -- a measure of the importance of the
Sikh community. He insists honour-based abuse is not a major issue for his community.
There is no honour code, I don't know this is all jargon that is borrowed.
Jasvinder Sanghera is a prominent campaigner with a Sikh background,
and she tells a story of... she has made a career out of saying these things! Are you
saying that what she's saying did not happen? To get a full picture, you need to look at
the wider picture. If she looks at her own family background and then expands from there,
that is wrong. That does seem to contradict accounts we've had from people
within the Sikh community that there is a problem?
So those sort of things occur, I wouldn't dismiss them for a moment, but it is the exaggerating, The British Government is so alarmed by the
frequency of violence that it plans to criminalise forced marriages, like Australia did earlier
this year, and the Foreign Office has a special forced marriage unit which attempts to track
down British citizens taken overseas. And there's another significant problem. And
there's another significant problem. Some Asian officers subscribe to the traditional
honour code. I'm not saying they can't properly investigate,
I'm saying they don't wish to investigate it.
They may have the same ideological view as the suspect family.
What about you as a Sikh? Are you feeling divorced from your community?
I think it would be fair to say I was divorced from my community, using your words. And when
I say 'my community', I'm talking about community leaders because they're the drivers, they
don't wish for me to speak publicly on these and other issues on which I do so frequently.
They are from a generation that's completely different from mine. They have come from an
Indian sub-continent and there's a vast gulf separating the two Today, honour crime campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera
enjoys life on her own terms as a mother of three. Her eldest daughter Natasha is a lawyer
and expecting a child Natasha married for love in a ceremony blending
the old and the new. Jasvinder needed to learn from scratch about
the Sikh customs, never having had her own traditional wedding.
It was a bittersweet day. No one was there from Jasvinder's family. Running away to avoid
a forced marriage caused a deep rift. Thirty years on, most of Jasvinder's remaining relatives
still shun her. "When I think that had she not have made that
choice, then a lot of the other things that ... well, the life that we've all lived,
me and my brother and my sister would not be the same.... I probably wouldn't have been
able to study in the same way that I did. I wouldn't have made the same career choices
that I did....." How do you feel about your mum and everything
she's gone through?" "Immensely proud. I don't think I could be prouder of my mum
and we're just like, you know, best friends really, and I think it's because of my mum's
experiences". For many British-Asian women there will be
no fairy tale wedding. The notion of family honour will continue to dictate whom they
marry and when - and even where the marriage will take place. Not a happy ending.
