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Society
'Honor' Most Foul
One cold
December evening, near the banks of the River Ravi, in Punjab (northern
India), two men jumped out of a jeep. The woman who was with them stumbled
out of the vehicle, asking them why they had stopped, wondering if this
was the way to Delhi. That was perhaps the last night of her life. Months
later, among the bodies washed up on the banks of the river, one may have
been that of Surjit Kaur Athwal, 26, a mother of two living in London. The
Punjab Police said they could not be sure. She had been reported missing
by her brother in December 1998.
Today, Athwal's brother, Jagdeesh Singh Dhillon, says the events of that
night were relayed to his family through an alarming series of anonymous
phone calls from men who claimed she was killed after she told her husband
that she wanted a divorce.
A family's reputation is considered paramount in several cultures. And
'honor killing' is a centuries-old practice by which people -
predominantly women - are murdered by relatives for behaving in a way that
is perceived to destroy the family's honor within the wider community.
According to Amnesty International (AI), every year, at least 1,000 women
and girls die in 'honor killings' in Pakistan. Besides the fact that women
are being murdered for 'honor' in India and other South Asian countries,
British-Asian women are also being killed in the United Kingdom.
Officially, Athwal remains missing after disappearing on a trip to India.
Investigations by London's Metropolitan (Met) Police show that her return
ticket was never used and her bank account remained untouched after she
arrived in India.
Dhillon says that after 10 years of marriage, Athwal had sought a divorce
- a step that caused deep anger in her marital home, led to her
disappearance and ultimately (Dhillon's family believe) her murder;
divorce is steeped in taboo in conservative Punjabi culture.
In 2003, in response to Dhillon's demands, British Foreign secretary Jack
Straw had requested the Indian government to instruct the Central Bureau
of Investigation to conduct an enquiry into Athwal's disappearance.
Despite these efforts, Dhillon is no closer to unraveling the truth today.
However, honor killings in the UK have alarmed the Met Police
sufficiently. Its officers have set up a nationwide murder prevention
scheme into the killing or disappearance of more than 100 British women
over the last decade, to see whether they were the victims of honor
killings and to examine how best to prevent such murders.
UK women's rights campaigners who work with British-Asian communities
believe that forced marriages - in which women are threatened with death
if they refuse to marry the man of their family's choice - can be a
precursor to honor killings.
"In almost all forced marriage cases we deal with, 95 per cent of our
clients have had the threat of death," says Kulbir Randhawa, coordinator
and counselor at the national charity, the London-based Asian Family
Counseling Service. AFCS advises Asian women referred to the service by
the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). So far, AFCS has not
had any clients murdered in honor killings.
Recognizing the magnitude of the problem of forced marriages, Britain's
Home Office and the FCO announced in October 2004 that a joint Forced
Marriage Unit (FMU) would be set up by the end of the year, specifically
to advise victims and professionals, including women's rights groups and
lawyers. The FMU will replace the existing FCO community liaison unit
which was established in October 2000 to help UK nationals taken abroad in
forced marriages.
In a statement to the British Parliament on October 27, 2004, UK Home
Secretary David Blunkett announced the new FMU as part of a raft of
measures designed to combat forced marriages. These include: starting a
consultation by the end of 2004 with women's groups and NGOs to see
whether forced marriage should become a criminal offence; issuing social
workers and education professionals with guidelines on how to tackle
forced marriages; raising the minimum age for marriage entry clearance
into the UK from 16 to 18; and posting an extra entry clearance officer in
Islamabad (Pakistan) to help British nationals who have been abandoned by
their spouses in Pakistan and want to return to the UK.
Although the FCO does not keep honor killings statistics, and classifies
the killings of British nationals abroad as 'murders', it does record
forced marriages. FCO research shows forced marriage numbers have not
fluctuated greatly since the community liaison unit was set up in 2000; of
the 250 or so forced marriages it intervenes in annually, the majority
deal with women of south-Asian origin. Of these, one-fifth cases are
related to helping women repatriate to the UK. Currently, AFCS deals with
between 50 and 60 women involved in forced marriages in the British-Asian
community each year - a number that has risen in the past few years.
Randhawa attributes the recent rise to the fact that it is easier for
spouses from abroad to settle in the UK under the current Labour
government. Also, she says, some Asian parents are reluctant to discard
traditions despite the fact they live in England: "A lot of them came here
in the 1950s and '60s. They are stuck in a time warp. Educating these
communities is crucial."
The British government is committed to tackling honor killings and forced
marriages, she says, but other governments, particularly in countries like
India, are not doing enough.
Hannana Siddiqui, joint coordinator at the London-based women's rights
group, Southall Black Sisters (SBS), agrees. SBS has devoted the past 25
years to campaigning for greater awareness of domestic abuse of women. The
group helps UK women from Asian and African backgrounds escape domestic
violence, dealing with between 240 and 300 forced marriage cases a year.
Not all honor-killing victims come from 'backward' communities, says
Siddiqui, but rather from families who find it difficult to change
cultural traditions. "I don't know whether honor killings are increasing
or falling because there's never been any monitoring. It may appear to be
increasing because more people are aware [of it]," says Siddiqui.
Pinpointing how many UK women are murdered in honor killings, both in
Britain and abroad, and coordinating policies to tackle it is a leviathan
task currently being undertaken by academics at the London-based School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The five-year research project
looking into honor crimes in 25 countries is due to be published next
summer (2005). This project is unique in that it has elicited opinions
from activists, lawyers and academics from across the world including the
UK, South Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, with a view to fighting
honor crimes by understanding the various legal and cultural parameters
and developing strategies accordingly.
Meanwhile, Dhillon and women's rights campaigners aver that honor killings
are a symptom of the larger societal illness of the abuse of women. And
they believe that governments and social groups must place the wider issue
of violence against women under the microscope and provide more resources
and commitment to tackle it.
– Rajeshree Sisodia
November 28, 2004
By arrangement with
Womens Feature Service
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