| Nazir Afzal | 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". | 03:34 |
| GFX. Stills of murdered women | GEARIN: These young British women were murdered in a perverse attempt to restore family honour. | 03:41 |
|
| Music | 03:48 |
| GFX. Still. Surjit Athwal | GEARIN: Twenty seven year old Surjit Athwal killed on the orders of her mother-in-law. | 03:52 |
| GFX. Still. Banaz Mahmod | Twenty year old Banaz Mahmod, raped and strangled on the orders of her father and uncle. | 03:58 |
| GFX. Still. Shafilea Ahmed | And seventeen year old Shafilea Ahmed, suffocated by her parents. | 04:04 |
| Ext. Bus passes mosque | Music | 04:11 |
| Shafilea as guest in wedding video | GEARIN: Shafilea had rejected her parent's choice of a Pakistani Muslim husband. She wanted to be a lawyer and to make her own choices. | 04:15 |
| B/W Photo. Shafilea's parents | Her parents decided she was shaming the family, beat her frequently | 04:25 |
| Shafilea as guest in wedding video | and finally forced a plastic bag down her throat. Her siblings were made to watch as a warning to them. Family honour was paramount. | 04:30 |
| Photo. Shafilea | Music | 04:40 |
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| GEARIN: When Shafilea's body was found in a river, | 04:43 |
| BBC Photo. Shafilea's parents | her parents put on tearful displays feigning innocence and outrage. | 04:46 |
| Photos. Shafilea | GEARIN: Years later one of Shafilea's sister's smashed the parent's conspiracy by giving evidence against them and they were sentenced to long gaol terms. | 04:51 |
| GFX. Photo overlay. Shafilea | Shafilea's repeated pleas for help were ignored, even a suicide attempt failed to convince police she was in desperate trouble. | 05:01 |
| Ext. Houses | JASVINDER SANGHERA: "She couldn't be any clearer - | 05:11 |
| Jasvinder | 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. | 05:14 |
| Gearin | When somebody is murdered, for example | 05:23 |
| Jasvinder | - 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. GEARIN: Who is being silent? JASVINDER SANGHERA: Who is being...? GEARIN: Silent. Who is being silent? | 05:25 |
| [shot continuous] | JASVINDER SANGHERA: 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. | 05:53 |
| Group of young men at pub |
| 06:27 |
|
| GEARIN: Saturday night in Leeds, one of the biggest cities with a significant Asian population. | 06:34 |
| Young people in city square | Teenagers flock to the city square, having fun. Many Asian girls don't enjoy these freedoms. | 06:41 |
| City light show. Night. |
| 06:51 |
|
| 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. | 06:54 |
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| JASVINDER SANGHERA: [Anti-Violence campaigner] "These teenagers, born here in Britain, | 07:06 |
| Jasvinder. Super: | 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". | 07:09 |
| Normanton Street, Derby | GEARIN: 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. | 07:25 |
| Mosque/Young people on street | In a recent survey of 500 young British people from Asian backgrounds, two-thirds said families should live according to the concept of honour. | 07:41 |
| Gearin on street to camera | 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. | 07:54 |
| Market | 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. | 08:16 |
| Nazir Afzal. Super: | NAZIR AFZAL: "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". | 08:36 |
| Nazir with colleagues in office | GEARIN: 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. | 09:03 |
|
| NAZIR AFZAL: "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 | 09:16 |
| Nazir | harm themselves - will actually kill themselves - and that... because that's the only way they can see out of this". | 09:29 |
| Ext. New Scotland Yard. Gearin walks with Palbinder | GEARIN: 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. DET CONST PALBINDER SINGH: [Metropolitan Police] "That concept exists in every Asiatic mind, | 09:39 |
| Palbinder Singh. Super: | 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". | 10:01 |
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| GEARIN: Detective Constable Palbinder Singh is a Sikh who's helped crack some difficult honour crime cases. | 10:12 |
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| DET CONST PALBINDER SINGH: I've always advocated to ignore cultural sensitivity. It's a ruse. | 10:20 |
|
| ‘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, | 10:24 |
| Muslim women walk on street | it's now crossing over into political correctness and it's simply not working". | 10:45 |
| Trudy Runham. Super: | DET SGT TRUDY RUNHAM: [West Midlands Police] 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. GEARIN: How much does a fear of being called racist play into it? | 10:54 |
| [shot continuous] | DET SGT TRUDY RUNHAM: 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. | 11:19 |
| Trudy Runham giving presentation to officers | GEARIN: Detective Sergeant Trudy Runham of the West Midlands Police has worked with many victims of honour based violence and tries to educate other officers. | 11:36 |
| Trudy Runham. | DET SGT TRUDY RUNHAM: 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. | 11:47 |
| Ext. Houses. Mosque in b/g |
| 12:19 |
| GFX overlay. Still. Banaz Mahmod | GEARIN: It was the horrific killing of Banaz Mahmod that catapulted honour crime into public consciousness in Britain and exposed the failings of police. | 12:21 |
| Jasvinder addressing detectives | JASVINDER SANGHERA: "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". | 12:33 |
| Photos of murdered women on computer/Jasvinder addressing detectives | GEARIN: 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. | 12:48 |
| Video footage of Banaz in hospital | Months later, lying in a hospital emergency room, she explained how her father had tried to kill her. | 13:05 |
| Jasvinder addressing detectives | JASVINDER SANGHERA: [Addressing trainee detectives] "And she was still not believed. She was dealt with as being melodramatic, fantasising". | 13:14 |
|
| GEARIN: 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. | 13:20 |
|
| JASVINDER SANGHERA: [Addressing trainee detectives] "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". | 13:33 |
| GFX overlay. Still. Banaz Mahmod murder | GEARIN: Just a month later, the twenty year old was dead. She'd been raped, garrotted, her body packed in a suitcase. | 13:41 |
| Photos. Banaz's uncle and father | Her uncle and father were convicted of ordering the killing. Banaz's sister Bekhal gave evidence against them. BEKHAL: "And all I could say is devilish... that's all | 13:53 |
| Bekhal | I could say... nothing good. How could somebody think that kind of thing, and actually do it to their own flesh and blood? | 14:02 |
| Ext. Houses | GEARIN: 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. | 14:11 |
| GFX overlay. Photo. Jasvinder/Sikh temple | She was the sixth of seven daughters, plus a much favoured son, raised in a close-knit Sikh community. | 14:24 |
| Jasvinder walks with Gearin | JASVINDER SANGHERA: "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. | 14:32 |
|
| Today, looking at the house, I see nothing but pain in honesty. It's really an empty shell for me now". | 14:40 |
| Sikh temple | Music | 14:46 |
| Jasvinder walks with Gearin | GEARIN: Jasvinder Sanghera describes a claustrophobic upbringing where girls lived by strict rules or were claimed to bring shame on their family. | 14:50 |
| Photo. Jasvinder's sisters | One by one she saw her older sisters married off, at about fourteen or fifteen years of age. JASVINDER SANGHERA: "I watched at least three of my sisters | 14:59 |
| Jasvinder | 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 | 15:09 |
| Photo. Jasvinder's sister holding baby | and nobody was seeing this as abnormal, it was just a normality". | 15:21 |
| Inside Sikh temple | Music | 15:26 |
|
| GEARIN: When her sisters complained of beatings by their husbands, her mother | 15:30 |
| Photo. Jasvinder's mother | would insist their duty was to stay in the marriages. | 15:34 |
| Inside Sikh temple | Music | 15:26 |
|
| Then one day after school, fourteen year old Jasvinder was shown a photo of the man her parents declared she would marry. | 15:38 |
| Photo. Jasvinder's mother | JASVINDER SANGHERA: "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. | 15:46 |
| Jasvinder. Super: | 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'. | 15:54 |
| Photo. Younger Jasvinder | Everywhere I turned they were just sending me back in and I felt isolated... suicidal. I felt completely trapped". | 16:02 |
|
| Music | 16:10 |
| Jasvinder and Gearin standing outside old family home | JASVINDER SANGHERA: "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". GEARIN: "How long for?" JASVINDER SANGHERA: "I can't remember the exact time. It was a number of weeks, but I remember planning my own escape". | 16:14 |
|
| GEARIN: When she eventually did run away, her mother said Jasvinder was dead to her. | 16:31 |
| Jasvinder and Gearin drive around neighbourhood | 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. JASVINDER SANGHERA: "If you're Asian and missing from education, the same questions are not asked | 16:37 |
| Jasvinder | 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". | 17:14 |
| Birmingham Airport | GEARIN: 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. | 17:31 |
| Nazir Afzal | NAZIR AFZAL: "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". | 17:52 |
| Birmingham Airport | GEARIN: The prosecutor says no one knows how many of those girls were taken from their country. [at the airport] "Imagine the fear, you're a British born and bred schoolgirl | 17:59 |
| Gearin to camera at airport | 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". | 18:12 |
| Anup Manota addresses police |
| 18:38 |
|
| 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. | 18:45 |
|
| ANUP MANOTA [addressing police officers]: 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. | 19:04 |
| Karma Nirvana counsellor on phone |
| 19:11 |
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| GEARIN: 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. | 19:15 |
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| JASVINDER SANGHERA: "So the call handler said, put a spoon in your knickers, which when you go through security | 19:34 |
| Jasvinder | 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". GEARIN: "And did she?" JASVINDER SANGHERA: "Which is exactly what she did and it saved her life". | 19:39 |
| Karma Nirvana counsellor on phone |
| 19:11 |
|
| GEARIN: 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. | 19:51 |
| Sal | SAL: 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. | 20:17 |
| Karma Nirvana office | GEARIN: Sal says that despite abuse and forced marriages, many girls choose to stay with their families. | 20:50 |
| Sal | SAL: 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. | 20:59 |
| Gearin walks with Lord Singh | GEARIN: But one senior Sikh figure says while a huge problem exists, it's not in his community. | 21:15 |
|
| LORD SINGH: It is just a big misunderstanding of who Sikhs are..." GEARIN: 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. | 21:24 |
| Lord Singh | LORD SINGH: There is no honour code, I don't know this is all jargon that is borrowed. | 21:42 |
|
| GEARIN: Jasvinder Sanghera is a prominent campaigner with a Sikh background, | 21:48 |
|
| and she tells a story of... LORD SINGH: she has made a career out of saying these things! GEARIN: Are you saying that what she's saying did not happen? LORD SINGH: 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. GEARIN: That does seem to | 21:51 |
|
| contradict accounts we've had from people within the Sikh community that there is a problem? | 22:10 |
|
| LORD SINGH: So those sort of things occur, I wouldn't dismiss them for a moment, but it is the exaggerating, | 22:15 |
| Westminster |
| 22:24 |
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| GEARIN: 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. | 22:32 |
| Inside Sikh temple | And there's another significant problem. And there's another significant problem. Some Asian officers subscribe to the traditional honour code. | 22:49 |
|
| PALBINDER SINGH: I'm not saying they can't properly investigate, I'm saying they don't wish to investigate it. | 23:01 |
| Palbinder Singh | They may have the same ideological view as the suspect family. | 23:05 |
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| GEARIN: What about you as a Sikh? Are you feeling divorced from your community? | 23:10 |
|
| PALBINDER SINGH: 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. | 23:14 |
| Inside Sikh temple | 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. | 23:39 |
| Jasvinder's home. Jasvinder and Natasha cook | Music | 23:52 |
|
| GEARIN: 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. | 24:12 |
|
| Music | 24:23 |
| Watching footage of Natasha's wedding |
| 24:26 |
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| GEARIN: Natasha married for love in a ceremony blending the old and the new. | 24:49 |
|
| Jasvinder needed to learn from scratch about the Sikh customs, never having had her own traditional wedding. | 24:58 |
|
| 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. | 25:09 |
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| Music | 25:25 |
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| NATASHA: "When I think that had she not have made that choice, then a lot of the other things | 25:36 |
| Jasvinder with Natasha and husband | 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....." | 25:39 |
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| GEARIN: How do you feel about your mum and everything she's gone through?" NATASHA: "Immensely proud. I don't think I could be prouder of my mum | 25:52 |
|
| and we're just like, you know, best friends really, and I think it's because of my mum's experiences". | 26:01 |
| Wedding | Music | 26:07 |
|
| GEARIN: 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. | 26:18 |
|
| Music | 26:33 |
| Credits: | Reporter: Mary Gearin Camera: David Martin Editor: Garth Thomas Research: Susannah Palk Producers: Bronwen Reed Greg Wilesmith Executive producer: Steve Taylor
| 26:50 |
| Further Information: | Karma Nirvana
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