Murder in the Name of Honor (25 page)

For far too long the British government has left the burden of dealing with so-called honour crimes to unpaid volunteer organizations. These organizations have been struggling to cope with demand, with the result that many thousands of people have suffered unnecessarily. There are many simple things that the UK government can still do to aid the fight against honour-based violence in the UK.

In terms of foreign policy, extradition treaties with Pakistan and Iraqi Kurdistan need to be put in place; the minimum age for those entering the UK on a marriage visa from abroad should be raised from eighteen to twenty-one; and it should be compulsory for anyone entering the UK to live to achieve a certain degree of fluency in English.

There also needs to be greater support for women's groups; women at risk need to know that help is available; forced marriages should be criminalized; accomplices and advocates of so-called honour killings should be punished; and trusted community leaders should try to educate men on the wrongs of honour-based violence (self-appointed ‘community leaders', such as the Muslim Council of Britain, have so far done little or nothing to tackle honour-based violence). Dealing with the root cause of honourbased violence will not only help end human rights abuses but will also have a range of positive consequences for immigrant communities and wider society. Many of these strategies may also help other western countries that are facing the same problem. One can but hope that governments across the world will act soon.

As a footnote to this section on the the UK, I was surprised to discover that there is a discriminatory law in England, similar to the ‘fit of fury' Article 98 in Jordan, which allows the reduction of the crime of murder to manslaughter when the case of provocation is successfully argued. Campaign groups have demanded changes to this law but their efforts have been strongly resisted by the most powerful judge in the land.

It has been argued that it is unfair that men can currently rely on a ‘fit of fury' as a partial justification for killing their unfaithful wives, while women who have been physically abused by their husbands and who have killed them out of the fear of further abuse have been denied any such defence, and have no choice but to face the straightforward charge of murder.

Calls for a change to the law were made after Sarah Thornton was jailed for life in 1990 for the murder of her husband, who had beaten her repeatedly. She won a retrial in 1996 and was freed after being convicted of manslaughter.
⁷⁶

In November 2008, the British government announced plans to change the law so that husbands and boyfriends would no longer be able to use the defence of infidelity to escape conviction.
Introducing the proposed changes (the first to the UK's homicide law since 1957), Harriet Harman, Minister for Women, said that for centuries the law had allowed men to escape a murder charge in domestic homicide cases by blaming the victim.

Under the reforms, men would be tried for murder rather than manslaughter for ‘crimes of passion', while women who kill their husbands because of years of abuse would be treated more leniently.

The reforms have been attacked by Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, who has instead argued in support of the defence of ‘sexual infidelity', which he said could help show whether a husband (or wife) had been provoked into killing a spouse.

Lord Phillips was reported in the
Independent
as saying, ‘I must confess to being uneasy about a law which so diminishes the significance of sexual infidelity as expressly to exclude it from even the possibility of amounting to provocation. Nor have ministerial statements persuaded me that it is necessary for the law to go that far.'

Under the proposals, men who kill wives or girlfriends will be less likely to escape murder convictions by pleading jealous anger. It is designed to help women like Sarah Thornton, who kill their husbands after a long period of abuse. People will also be able to claim they killed for fear of suffering more violence in the future.

The change would replace the present defence of ‘provocation' with a new defence based on ‘words or conduct', which made defendants feel ‘seriously wronged' or fear violence against them. The new defences will allow killers to be sentenced for manslaughter instead of murder. At the time of writing, the changes are being debated in the British Parliament and, needless to say, I am watching with considerable interest.

European communities have done extensive work and offered professional protection and services for female victims of domestic violence. Unfortunately, they have so far looked the other way when dealing with honour-related violence in immigrant communities. All too often, they see the violence within these communities as culturally based and therefore entirely separate from European laws and value systems.

However, after some brutal incidents, European countries have now started to pay increased attention to so-called honour crimes, forced marriages and other forms of oppression of women within immigrant communities. Murders committed in the name of family honour by immigrant communities had been reported back in the early 1990s, but because it was still a poorly understood phenomenon, it wasn't picked up on by the authorities. Many professional staff who received reports of so-called honour killings and honour-based violence simply regarded it as a ‘cultural expression, and nothing to get involved in'.
⁷⁷

Asma Jahangir, Special Rapporteur on religious freedom for the UN Commission on Human Rights, told me in a phone interview in November 2006 that activism in the Third World by NGOs and individuals, mainly in Jordan and Pakistan, had contributed to raising the awareness of these abuses within European immigrant communities.

‘Western countries did not believe these crimes were happening
and thought they were immune and that it only happened in our part of the world until they were confronted with two horrifying so-called honour murders committed by migrants within the migrant communities,' Jahangir said.

Jahangir was referring to Heshu Yones, discussed earlier, and the case of twenty-six-year-old Fadime Sahindal in Sweden, which attracted the attention of European governments, NGOs, the police and activists.

On 20 November 2001, the Violence against Women network arranged a seminar entitled ‘Integration on whose terms?' Fadime Sahindal told her story to the Swedish Parliament during that seminar:

I'm going to talk about how hard it is to be caught between the demands of your family and the demands of society. I want to point out that this is not only about women from the Middle East.

I'm twenty-five years old and come from a small village in the Turkish part of Kurdistan. I come from a happy family with clear role divisions. When I was seven years old, my family came to Sweden. They told me not to play with Swedish children, to come straight home from school every day.

My parents thought that school was a good thing as long as you learned to read and write, but that girls didn't need a higher education. The most important thing was for me to go back to Turkey one day and get married.

But when the time came, I refused because I thought that I was too young. Besides, I wanted to choose my own husband. I told them I wouldn't go back to Turkey. For them, my marriage was for the good of the entire family. Even if I didn't want to get married, it was better for one member of the family to feel disgraced than the whole family. But I considered myself to be a member of Swedish society.

I began to test my limits more and more. I hung out with my Swedish friends and came home later than I was supposed to. It was important for me to stand on my own two feet, to get an education and develop my abilities. My family was against that. They regarded Swedish girls as loose – with no respect for their families. Swedes switch partners without worrying about the honour of their family. My family's opinions were riddled with prejudice. They made me confused and ambivalent. I was forced to lead a double life.

One day I met a Swedish guy named Patrik and we fell in love. But it was important that my family not find out about it. I was afraid of what would happen if my family found out that I had met a Swedish guy.

After being together for a year, we became less and less careful. Then the unthinkable thing happened – my dad caught us. His first reaction was to strike both Patrik and me. According to him, the role of a father is to defend and protect his daughter.

He assumed that Patrik and I had a sexual relationship. It is important to be a virgin – the tradition of showing the spot of blood on the sheet after the wedding night is still alive.

For my family, the purpose of my life was to marry a Kurdish man. All of a sudden, I had been transformed from a nice Kurdish girl into a slut. I decided to break with my family and move to Sundsvall. My brother found me and threatened me. The situation got worse and worse. The reason that my brother came was that he was a minor and wouldn't be punished as severely by the law.

I reported the incident to the police, but they didn't take me seriously. They advised me to talk with my family and ask them not to threaten me any more. So I turned to the media instead. This attracted a great deal of attention. A number of similar cases had arisen around the same time. I gave a voice and a face to the oppression.

When I went to the police a second time, I was received by a policeman who had experience with similar cases. He understood the seriousness of the situation and offered me protection.

My report led to a court case. My father was convicted of making unlawful threats. My mother got the blame for my having left the family. She also blamed herself.

Today I feel strong and stable, but it has been a long process to get this far. I have had to give up my background and create a new identity. I have had to leave my family.

I've paid a high price for that. My friends have become my new family. I don't regret having left, but I'm sad that I was forced to do it. My family lost both their honour and a daughter.

It could have been prevented. If society had assumed its responsibility for integrating my family, it could have been prevented. If the Kurdish Association had helped my family, it could have been prevented.

I don't feel any bitterness, but I think it's important to learn from what has happened to me. I hope that it doesn't happen again. I think it's important not to shut our eyes to the situation of girls from immigrant families.

Her case became known in Sweden in 1998 when Fadime and Patrik filed a lawsuit against her father and brother after they had threatened to kill them. They won the case. But a month later, on 3 June 1998, the day Fadime and Patrik had planned to move in with each other, Patrik died in a car accident.

Bam Bjorling, the President of Kvinnoforum, a Swedish women's organization, met Fadime several times. ‘She told me she was leaving Sweden. She was returning to her family's home to say goodbye to one of her sisters with whom she was in direct contact, she also said it was because she loved her mother and wanted to tell her goodbye.'
⁷⁸

Fadime left to see her mother and sisters in Uppsala on 21 January 2002. Her father, alerted by Fadime's mother, was waiting for her and shot her in the head in front of her mother and two sisters. He was arrested the following day when he confessed and said he had acted to save his family's honour. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on 3 April 2002.

When Fadime was alive, she provoked sympathy among Swedes but there was little willingness to get involved in what was seen as a family matter. It was only once she was murdered that this young victim of an ‘honour killing' drew a lot of attention to the cultural double standards she had battled for so long against.

The Scandinavian newspaper
Aftonbladet
said the immigration and integration debate had previously been dominated by so-called expert opinion-makers – noticeably middle-aged Swedish men – but after Fadime's murder, the floodgates opened. Young immigrant women started relating their experiences in newspapers, while immigrant organizations were suddenly given airtime on TV and radio stations.

Aftonbladet
led the way, stating that the debate revealed that the divide in Sweden was not between ‘Swedes' and ‘immigrants' – ‘us' and ‘them' – but between those who challenge and those who preserve the patriarchal structures which killed Fadime.

‘Many immigration organizations can do a hundred times more to help the women,' said Niklas Keleman from the Red Barnet (Save the Child) Dialog project. This project was started five years ago to prevent violence against women and children in immigrant communities by focusing on changing the attitudes of men. ‘Officially almost all [organizations] say “yes, of course we want to do something about this,” but they have to address the problems associated with the way women and children are looked upon,' Keleman said.

Parvin Kaboly, the Kurdish spokeswoman of the Committee of Iranian Women's Rights, describes many NGO immigrant organizations as ‘patriarchal breeding-grounds'. ‘I hope that the
government will examine them. The message the organizations are generating to their members must be considered. Of course many of them are doing very good jobs, but many of them do not have the courage to challenge the oppression in the immigration communities.'

On top of this are institutional flaws, such as the two years it takes to reach a decision on asylum requests. This encourages waiting immigrants to band together in bleak housing estates, a self-imposed segregation beyond the control of the police. And there are plenty of them; almost one million of Sweden's nine million residents are non-Nordic. Somalis, Kurds, Bosnians and dozens of other groups live in ghettos about thirty minutes from Stockholm.

Sweden has hosted a number of high-profile conferences on honour-related violence in Europe. I attended one in 2004 that was organized by Kvinnoforum. Its purpose was to learn how Middle Eastern countries such as Jordan have dealt with the phenomenon so far.
⁷⁹