“how on earth do you change the attitude of someone who is willing to kill his own daughter for flirting”

My proposal, as always, is to work in a layered way from the bottom up to de-stabilise the hardest attitudes at the top.

The killers are hard cases who- you are right- are unlikely to switch thinking at the drop of a hat. But race politics 101, lesson 1, states that you cannot treat racial groups as homogeneous. Among the Asian community there exist a great many attitudes and approaches, but the traditionalists hold the most influence around the major social hubs- temples, Gurudwaras and mosques.

At the moment if you are Asian and against the traditional influence it is very hard to make a convincing case to the older generation e.g. parents and elders, because you cannot invoke a universally recognised reference point to back up your arguments. Contrast this with e.g. the workplace, where 30+ years of legislation and communication HAVE changed attitudes, and can be invoked as a reference point.

If there were a public drive to confront the bad attitudes in the Asian and other communities, with say posters, media content, and the backing of Asian (and non-Asian) celebs a bit more relevant today than Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar* THAT would be the beginning of a reference point.

*try Nihal, Kayper, Sangeeta Myska… I would say Konnie Huq as she introduced MixTogether’s piece on News 24- but have you ever read her interview in Asiana?! I’m not sure she’d get off the fence…

Good point (about the taxis).

Mixtogether:

Who is Tony Hutchinson? I can’t recall his name. I agree that there are still many people opposed to cracking down on HBV, especially within the police and other state bodies. Hopefully they will be overcome one day. Regarding Philip Balmforth, have you heard anymore about his case? The EDM put forward by Ann Cryer has now reached 72 MPs, but I haven’t anything about him for a bit. I didn’t inculde the bounty hunters as a catagory, because I was just thinking about those who are state officials (unless there have been some cases that I haven’t come across).

You are right that one of the ways to combat the attitdues to shape HBV is to give more backing to mixed couples. However, the reason why the state focuses on the crime rather than the attidues is that it is easier to prevent and/or prosecuted a crime then it is to change someone’s attidue. HBV will never fade until attitudes change, but how on earth do you change the attitude of someone who is willing to kill his own daughter for flirting?

“It’s nice to feel like I’m not alone at my computer every night, which is why this blog post has made my day.”

I know that we have our disagreements, but you do brilliant work as well. Thanks.

Galloise Blonde:

The link to your site doesn’t work today. It just says that the domain name has expired or is being renewed.

Sunday, 10 February 2008, Independent reported ..

Up to 17,000 women in Britain are being subjected to “honour” related violence, including murder, every year, according to police chiefs. This figure probably dismisses actual figures which go unreported.

According to crimeinfo.gov.uk

How many people are affected by domestic violence?

The police in the UK receive, on average, one call a minute from someone asking for help in a domestic violence incident. Yet this figure — over 500,000 incidents a year — is probably only a third of the domestic violence that actually happens. In four out of every five incidents the victims are women, and more than half of victims of domestic violence are victimised more than once. No other type of crime has a repeat victimisation rate this high.

We can’t talk about honour based violence without looking at the environment for domestic violence against women – which is endemic in British society – across all communities.

What a horrible thought to go to sleep with …

Thank you.

As for the Telegraph article, I get the impression it was cobbled together from a chat from Steve, the rest seems to be cribbed from the Civitas/Brandon report. I hoping that with the passing of the new Forced Marriage act, which according to the recommendations from the parliamentary sub-committee recently published, will make FMU guidelines mandatory, that we will be in a better position to take action against those who collude in these crimes.

What you say about taxi drivers in Denmark is similar to the point i made in #21.

I do hope that honour killings are much rarer in the Nordic countries than they are in the UK, and I hope it stays rare.

Btw – Scandinavia is a great place to go on summer holiday. I’ve been for the last few summers and have to say that British people who prefer the Mediteranean (Spain, Portugal etc) dont know what they are missing !

Good points. The bigger issue is domestic violence or gender based violence and criminality.

And we have a huge problems on our hands across all of Britain’s communities. Didn’t the Met run this highly effective campaign on the Tube on domestic violence a while ago? Something like that would be great. I remember thinking how effective it was that each pedestrian was faced with the horror of domestic violence against women every morning while I waited for a train. I saw the reaction on men’s faces as we both thought the same: could this still be the case in 21st century London? Peer pressure and social taboos are also an effective way to combat such deep-seated attitudes against women.

Similarly here in Nepal, crimes against women is so prevalent – you can beat a women to death or near death if she does anything as daring as defend human rights. A husband recently put poison in his wife’s drink because she was a prominent human rights defender and he didn’t want her to work. Two weeks ago, in fact. There was no defence of ‘honour’, just punishment because she was choosing to work and not stay at home. So? The broader attitudes that allows violence against women to take place is the fundemental issue – not the ‘culture’ of this country or that. If we stuck at ‘cultural’ explanations for gender based violence we couldn’t really defend any universal human rights – women’s rights or children’s rights.

“Asian man kills his wife for having an affair: Honour Killing.

White man kills his wife for having an affair…?”

How about:

Bunch of white guys kidnap a young Asian girl, take her overseas to be raped repeatedly by a man she has never met before: Kidnap and rape

Bunch of Asian guys kidnap a young Asian girl, take her overseas to be raped repeatedly by a man she has never met before: Forced Marriage

or

17,000 violent assaults in a year on gay people (hypothetically): outcry and immediate, strident action.

17,000 violent assaults in a year on young Asian women by family members for ‘honour’ (reported in the Independent, from police estimates): virtually nothing.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

thanks for a great post. This issue has been highlighted at an increasing number of conferences on HBV issues. It is a particularly insidious form of information leaking as it relies on cover from the widespread social engineering that says medical professionals are to be trusted.

It represents an infiltration into the heart of what should be the most secure and confidential information (if such a thing still exists) by people operating unde the cover of Multiculturalism. Both the police and the medical infiltrations are extremely alarming.

Commander Allen is a really top man, and he ‘gets’ the problem exactly. Along with Tony Hutchison (a 6 foot no-nonsense Geordie who you may have seen giving briefings on the ‘canoe man’) he is bringing a much needed dose of straight thinking to the police response to HBV. Unfortunately there are forces ranged against them:

“Philip Balmforth, a West Yorkshire policeman who is recognised as one of the UK’s leading authorities on honour-violence, has been threatened with the sack for speaking to the press.

Balmforth has been suspended from his duty and faces a disciplinary hearing later this week for giving an interview to The Times about Asian children who go missing from schools in Bradford.” (http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/blog/human_rights/)

The fundamental problem with the current response to HBV is that it goes top-down, dealing with the problems and not the causes. The major incidents of HBV and honour murders which make the press are in fact the tip of an enormous iceberg of interlinked problems which pervade significant parts of the UK Asian population (leaving aside the sub-continent itself).

Fine words abound, and many of them are heartfelt, including those from the police officers named above. Some are being backed up by action, and Karma Nirvana under Jasvinder Sanghera is the key force here.

However, until the political and voluntary establishment (and yes, bloggers and journalists) have the guts to publicly point the finger at the known high-risk groups and force a debate, lives will continue to be wasted. Not only by honour murders, but by the blight of forced marriages and the subtly crippling methods of family abandonment and casting out.

I believe that one of the key methods of disrupting the enclosed system which endorses all of these cruel practices is to get behind mixed couples and break the taboo which keeps so many of them in hiding. If all the mixed couples both now and in the future could stand up publicly with confidence, it would begin a sea change, from the bottom up. That is why I devote the vast majority of my spare time outside my 9-5 job to MixTogether.

It’s nice to feel like I’m not alone at my computer every night, which is why this blog post has made my day.

Thanks.

p.s. your 3 categories of information leaker left out the chilling 4th category- the professional bounty hunters who operate among the Asian community…

I did realise of course that it wouldn’t be so much of a problem in say East Anglia and the South West. Glad to hear that it’s not as bad as all that in the parts of London either.

Rumbold 19 wrote … this isn’t … Islam as the driving forced behind these ‘honour’ killings. … A number of HBV cases involve Hindus, Sikhs and so on, so it is evidentally not a Muslim problem. … Indeed. I have seen sporadic reports of this in the Drive-By Media.

Rumbold 19 wrote … Cultural pressures have created an atmosphere … women should be kept into line. …

Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus from the India, Pakistan and Bangladesh share a not wholly dissimilar rate of endogamous marriage. Across much of the world marriage to close relatives is common. consang.net gives details of this worldwide. The people who came to Britain in large numbers continue this tradition; see BBC TV Newsnight

Does anyone know of a study of HBV and endogamous marriage?

Is HBV another cost of endogamous marriage? Endogamous marriage costs money, to quote “British Pakistanis are 13 times more likely to have children with genetic disorders than the general population – they account for just over 3% of all births but have just under a third of all British children with such illnesses.

Indeed, Birmingham Primary Care Trust estimates that one in ten of all children born to first cousins in the city either dies in infancy or goes on to develop serious disability as a result of a recessive genetic disorder. [emphasis added]”

Secondly, these are people born here choosing partners from abroad facilitating chain migration of like minded people – what possibility is there of democracy as we know of it in the West continuing if half the population is married to a cousin?

“It isn’t good enough, but it is not bad advice either (sadly).”

Similarly, if i were a South Asian girl who had been out drinking and clubbing in any large British town,i would be very nervous about getting into a taxi where the driver was Asian – just in case he happened to be a member of the religious/moral police (who despite having no official jurisdiction in this country, seem to have an awful lot of influence over what is going on).

“The implication I take from it is that Asian women should be careful about going to the doctor, going to the police, going to civil service agencies because they can’t trust the staff. I really don’t think that’s good enough.”

It isn’t good enough, but it is not bad advice either (sadly). These people need to be rooted out, but I wouldn’t know how to do that, apart from the really blatant cases.

“Meant to say though, thanks for the blog Rumbold, good stuff.”

Very kind of you, but no need to thank me.

Bert Rustle:

Thank you for the clarification. As many have said before, this isn’t a mUslim problem in the sense that it is Islam as the driving forced behind these ‘honour’ killings. Cultural pressures have created an atmosphere whereby it is expecting amongst certain quarters that women should be kept into line. A number of HBV cases involve Hindus, Sikhs and so on, so it is evidentally not a Muslim problem. That is not to say that there aren’t passages in the Qur’an that encourage the punishment of women for ‘misbehaving’, but you can find similar passages in the Bible too.

Sam Ambreen:

The motivation is honour, not in the way you or I consider it, but ultimately these murderers think by doing what they do will restore their honour. An ‘honour’ killing is usually held to be one which was agreed on by a number of people, usually inlaws and/or relatives, and which was designed to restore the family’s standing in the eyes of some. This is why your analogy of a white man killing his wife for cheating doesn’t work. If he went down the pub afterwards, some people might sympathise with his decision, but there would have been no pressure for him to kill her from the community. Some British Asian families whose young women have ‘misbehaved’ and not been punished have suffered ostracisation. If you haven’t already read it, I would recommend ‘Crimes of the Community’ by James Brandon.

“People like me don’t use it because we approve of it, but because it reflects the motivation of the criminal.”

The motivation of the criminal is not honour, it is control (thanks Phillip Hunt), an “I’ll show them”.

“Honour” crimes/killings are incredibly disrespectful to their victims, that somehow they must have brought it on themselves.

Asian man kills his wife for having an affair: Honour Killing.

White man kills his wife for having an affair…?

Ally 14 wrote … Like others have said, I really don’t understand this type of report. … There was a similar reluctance by the Ruling Class to act when predominantly Muslim men in the North of England were grooming non-Muslim minors for sex, predominantly but not exclusively indigenous.

BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour program did an article Inter-racial Grooming of Girls for Sex It lasts eight minutes.

From the description … Two men have been jailed for the sexual exploitation of two young girls aged under 16. … The Labour MP for Keighley – Ann Cryer – has said that she has been contacted by mothers who are worried that some Asian men are targeting their under age daughters. The charity CROP – the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping – says that in the last four and a half years they have been contacted by over 200 concerned families. In 35% to 40% of these cases the groups of men involved in exploitation have been predominantly Asian. …

Reportedly this had been going on for several years, yet the Ruling Class did not prosecute most of the known perpetrators. Initially, the only reports I saw of this was on the BNP website, without corroboration. However there have since been programs on Radio 5 Live and Channel 4, some years after the BNP reports.

I would hazard a guess that the mindset described in Reporting Diversity is prevalent throughout the Ruling Class, which prevents them drawing attention to undesirable actions of the non-indigenous population.

The first two questions I asked of Rumbold in comment 5 above are directly relevant.

I would hazard a guess that the Muslim women concerned will be sacrificed to the promotion of Diversity, as the female minors were and that they would be well advised to avoid Muslim professionals generally.

The implication I take from it is that Asian women should be careful about going to the doctor, going to the police, going to civil service agencies because they can’t trust the staff. I really don’t think that’s good enough.

Meant to say though, thanks for the blog Rumbold, good stuff.