The pandemic of "honour" killings

 

Let's start calling so-called "honour" killings by their real name. They are misogynistic murders. They are the murders of girls and women who have done nothing wrong. They are murders committed almost exclusively by men, although women can be complicit. They are murders with vile motivations such as a taking false offence, feeling an unwarranted sense of shame, a desire to control girls and women in everything they say, do and think, a heinous jealousy that is never flattering, a desire to maintain a sickening patriarchy where men and boys enjoy freedoms that they deny to the girls and women in their lives.

The disgusting reality of misogynistic murders was brought into sharp focus last week with Honour, the ITV drama based on the 2006 murder of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod at the hands of her own father and uncle. Three of her cousins and two family friends were also convicted in relation to her killing. Her non-crime was to leave an abusive forced marriage and find happiness with a new boyfriend, who killed himself 10 years after Banaz was murdered. 

Banaz had gone to the police multiple times to share her very real fears that her life was in danger, even naming names of the people of whom she was rightly terrified, but she was not taken seriously until she went missing. Her body was found in a suitcase buried in a derelict garden in Birmingham, after she was killed in South London a few miles from where I'm now sitting. She is buried at the cemetery down the road. Her family tried to insult her one last time with an unmarked grave but a granite memorial stone now marks her final resting place, paid for by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO), police officers and Nazir Afzal, the tenacious lead prosecutor in her case.

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ITV drama was the portrayal of Diana Nammi by brilliant, brave Saudi actress Ahd Hassan Kamel. Diana is a British-Kurdish activist who came to the UK as an asylum seeker, founding IKWRO in 2002. There is a scene where she expresses her sheer frustration that because she is a woman, she is not considered a leader in the community where Banaz and her Iraq-Kurdish family lived.

But Diana is a leader. It is so important that Britain has elevated her to this status because of her important work, which included helping bring Banaz's killers to justice. In 2014, she received a Barclays Woman of the Year award,s a Women on the Move award from UNHCR and named one of the BBC's 100 Women. In 2015, she received a Voices of Courage award from the Women's Refugee Commission in 2015 and an honorary degree from the University of Essex in 2016.  

This is important because Britain needs to be better than the misogynistic murderers of Banaz Mamod, to take a stand, to speak the truth that there is nothing honourable about honour killings. A vital part of this is for Britain to be a place where women, regardless of their ethnicity, are empowered to be community leaders, to be taken seriously when they defend vulnerable girls and women and denounce misogynistic, patriarchal cultures - all of them everywhere - in no uncertain terms.

Appalling stories such as that of Banaz Mahmod are low-hanging fruit for racists. There will always be the people whose first reaction is to blame immigration, to claim that if "these people" weren't allowed in the UK, then such murders wouldn't happen here. 

This is a dreadful notion for two reasons. 

Firstly, while Banaz Mahmod would not have been killed on British soil if her family didn't come to the UK, it is entirely possible that she could have been killed in similar circumstances in Iraq - the problem of so-called honour killings would simply happen elsewhere and that is equally as unacceptable as when it happens here. The banning of immigration and, in particular, the stopping of all asylum seekers being allowed to seek safety in the UK, simply moves the problem to other countries. If Britain is serious about the moral high ground and about stopping the bloodshed, it is essential that we condemn all so-called honour killings, no matter where they happen.

And secondly, it is wrong to claim that such murders are only the domain of immigrants, that the only hands that are gripped around innocent necks or holding knives or tightening ligatures or pointing guns in the name of false offence or bringing supposed shame to families and, in particular, to men belong solely to foreigners.

In the UK, the number of women killed by current or former partner is on the increase. Data from the Office for National Statistics showed that 80 women were killed by a current or former partner between April 2018 and March 2019, a 27% increase on the previous year.

If you think these men's motivations are any different to those of the pathetic men who were offended by Banaz Mahmod making her own life choices, you're mistaken. When women are murdered by men close to them, it doesn't matter what colour anyone's skin is or whether anyone's family has been in the UK for a few years or since Roman times. The killers are still men who hate women. They are still offended because a woman has dared to leave or spurned advances or was perceived to have strayed or flirted or fell short of some impossible standard. These men, just as surely as Banaz Mahmod's killers did, feel a misguided and bogus shame, feel like they have lost control of women they considered their property, feel their pitiful male pride has been wounded by women who would not comply. 

If we are serious about ending this misogynistic turf war that is fought on women's bodies, more needs to be done. We should absolutely engage with all communities in Britain, to uphold courageous people such as Diana Nammi who shine a light on this hatred and violence at great personal cost. But we also need to acknowledge that murderous misogyny is not exclusive to any one community or ethnic group. It is a dark stain on every town and city and as long as women are killed by people close to them every single week, it shames us all.   

Photography by Joanne Adela Low/Pexels 

On being told to go home

                                     

I'm an immigrant. I was not born in the UK, my passport says I'm Australian. But I have indefinite leave to remain in the UK, I am married to a British man, I work here, I pay tax here, I vote here. I am a privileged immigrant - I have not been subjected to horrendous racism in the eight years that I have lived here. Of course, I have been told more than once that I'm "the kind of immigrant we like", which is usually code for "white skin, native English speaker, not a Muslim" - that is obviously racist too - but I have never been subjected to the sort of racist abuse that leaves people fearing for their personal safety.

Only once have I been told to go home. It happened a few weeks ago on Twitter (where else?) when I had the temerity to express an opinion on the sorry state of British politics. Some faceless, nameless, gutless individual felt the need to reply to me, saying that if I don't like it here, I can always go back to Australia. The tweet was accompanied by a picture of an angry bloke holding a blue passport. (Spoiler alert: I've had a blue passport my whole life and they're not that exciting...).

But plenty of people get told to go home all the time. It's tiresome, it's repetitive, it's wearing and, above all, it's racist. When the president of the United States uses the "go home, go back to where you came from" rhetoric, it's still racist. The two men who are vying to be the next prime minister, however, were unable to say that Trump's words were racist.

In a particularly pathetic display on BBC Breakfast, Jeremy Hunt said he wouldn't use "the r-word". The r-word? Really? It's one thing to say "the n-word" rather than lower oneself to use a particularly vile racial slur against black people but to reduce a word that was entirely accurate in the context to "the r-word" is pitiful. He then went on to say that he was the father of two half-Chinese children, as if that made everything OK. It doesn't make anything OK. If anything, it makes things worse - if some cretin told Jeremy Hunt's kids to go back to where they came from, would he condemn that person as a racist? Or is it only people we're seeking trade deals from that get a leave pass to be a bigot?

Of course, that was everyone's defence of the mealy-mouthed responses of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt to Trump's awful comments. It's the Special Relationship! They're our closest ally! We need to do a trade deal after Brexit! Ilhan Omar's a racist too!

A few things: the special relationship predates the Trump administration and it will long outlive his presidency and the premiership of either Johnson or Hunt; trade deals take years to negotiate and a negotiation with the US will almost certainly go on for longer than our next PM is in office; and if a trade deal is done in a hurry, it will not be a great deal for the UK. Trump means it when he says "America first".

And in regard to Ilhan Omar, it is possible to disagree with her position on a number of issues without resorting to one of the oldest racist insults in the book. We should be better than that, but it seems that, increasingly, we are not.

We've reached peak whataboutery when it comes to accusing people of racism, particularly in the Labour and Conservative parties. Anyone who dares call out anti-semitism in Labour is guaranteed to have someone yell "But what about Tory Islamophobia?" at them and vice versa. How about we aim to reach a place where none of it is OK? How about we stand up against racism without trampling on another group which also experiences racism and ensure our own houses are in order before we start deflecting attention to the house across the street?

This is how we've ended up with Katie Hopkins using her supposed support of Israel and Jewish people as sticks with which to bash Muslims, even though she is not above making anti-semitic comments herself and making allusions to a "final solution" or using dehumanising language when it comes to migrants. Hopkins merely picks on a group of people for her own self-promotion and profit. If it's not Muslims, it might be poor people or obese people or people with tattoos or any other group she seeks to demonise in her desperate quest to stay relevant. Any one of us could be her next target and her loyal band of haters will gleefully wave their pitchforks and join in the pile-ons.

It's no coincidence that Trump and Hopkins are in bed together, at least in the online world, with their cosy, bile-laden circle jerk of mutual tweeting.

Trump's comments matter on this side of the pond because many people over here look to him for inspiration, to legitimise their own awful views. We do need to maintain a relationship with the US but it is possible to do this without lowering ourselves to Trump's level. Britain must be better than that if we are at all serious about remaining an influential country, if we are serious about setting an example to the world, if we care about our standing in the global community and, above all, if we truly love this country and the people who call it home.


Photography by Jim Larrison/Flickr 

An open letter to Peter Bucklitsch

Dear Mr Bucklitsch,

Your disgraceful tweet today made me incredibly relieved that you failed to become my MP in the constituency of Wimbledon at the May election. Only 2,476 people in my neighbourhood voted for you and the rest of us should be glad.

I have no idea if you plan to stand for public office again, but if you ever do, you will be reminded on a daily basis that you felt the need to tweet: "The little Syrian boy was well clothed & well fed. He died because his parents were greedy for the good life in Europe. Queue jumping costs."

Then you felt the need to tweet a bonus load of hateful tripe: "Turkey is not a place where the family was in danger. Leaving that safe place put the family in peril."

As Kurds, the family were not have been warmly welcomed in Turkey. Thus they left Turkey. And then they washed up dead in Turkey. They were not on a beach in Bodrum for a suntan.

You have since deleted the tweets and your Twitter profile but, thanks to the magic of screen grabs, your vile words will still be accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Firstly, there is no queue to enter a safe country. When you are escaping a war zone, good manners don't apply. It is not like politely waiting your turn to get on the 163 from Wimbledon to Morden.

But what I really want to know, Mr Bucklitsch, is what you actually know about refugees, about the people who are seeking to do whatever it takes to get themselves and their families away from war zones and oppressive, undemocratic regimes?

I am really sorry that Aylan Kurdi, the dead child to which you referred in your sickening tweet, does not fit your stereotype of what a refugee should look like. I am sure his family were not concerned with ensuring their children looked sufficiently like scrawny, scruffy extras from Oliver! before they fled Syria so that people like you would not sneer from the comfort of safe and stable nations.

Aylan, his brother Galip, and his mother, Rehan, are now all dead. Only his father, Abdullah, survived. We know that they wanted to ultimately reach Canada, where they have relatives, not "the good life in Europe". We know they had been trying to enter Canada legally as asylum-seekers but had already had an application rejected. We know that they came from Kobani, a town which has suffered terribly because of appalling violence between IS and Kurdish fighters.

Abdullah was working as a barber in Syria. Presumably, until recently, he was able to earn a living to support his family, to buy them clothes and food. This was not so that people like you, Mr Bucklitsch, would question their refugee status because Aylan was apparently too well-dressed and not under-nourished enough for your liking.

Throughout history, refugees have not necessarily been starving, rag-clad waifs. In the lead up to WWII and from the time war was declared on Germany in 1939, thousands of affluent Jews fled for their lives. Educated people also have a long history of fleeing oppression. Hadi Khorsandi, the poet, satirist and father of stand-up comedian, Shappi Khorsandi, fled Iran, coming to Britain with his family after he criticised the regime that took power after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Countries such as Australia took many refugees from Cambodia during the awful years of Pol Pot's dictatorship - a particular target of his genocide was the educated and skilled. He did not want educated, skilled people. He wanted compliant automatons to work in a purely agrarian society.

But sadly, people like you, Mr Bucklitsch, have little interest in learning from history.

Thank you for adding nothing constructive to the debate. Thank you for reducing a global problem to a single, shameful, ignorant tweet that shows you did not bother to learn anything about the Kurdi family. Thank you for proving that as long as the people fleeing countries like Syria are seen as a "swarm" rather than real people with skills and life stories, we will not come any closer to resolving this horrific situation.

Yours sincerely,

Georgia Lewis





Photo by Gerhard Lipold

UKIP and the man behind the green door

It is a house I walk past every time I walk to the tube station. Like my own house, it's a 1930s semi with bay windows at the front. Unlike my house, it still has the lovely original front door. And unlike my house, there is a poster stuck to the front window telling people not to deliver leaflets from any other political party because the occupant is voting UKIP.

I'd often wonder as I walked past who might live there. If I ever spotted the occupant in the front garden, would I have the nerve to ask them about the poster, to tell me what particular policies of UKIP they like so much? Would they eloquently defend UKIP? Would they end up telling me I'm OK, that I'm one of the immigrants "we like", which is always code for "white, native English speaker, not wearing a hijab"?

Today I got to find out who lives at the house with the cute green door. It was a humbling lesson.

I was doing my usual walk to the tube station, my attempt to keep vaguely fit and save Oyster card credit by foregoing a five-minute bus ride for a 15-minute walk, when I noticed the green door was open. I am a chronic sticky-beak so I took a peek. There were two builders standing in the doorway. Lying on the floor was an elderly man. He was pale, he was incoherent, he seemed agitated, he didn't appear to have all his clothes on even though it was a chilly morning.

The old man was clearly in trouble and the builders were desperately trying to get him on his feet. I asked if everything was OK. They told me they'd come over to remove his old conservatory, he'd struggled to answer the door and now he was on the ground. There was a nasty bruise on his forehead caked with dried blood.

I called the ambulance while the builders slowly got him on his feet, carried him to the sofa and covered him with a blanket, an attempt to restore some of the man's dignity. As I explained the situation to 999, I saw the house was a mess, it smelled of urine, soiled underwear was discarded on the kitchen floor, the peeling living room wallpaper was smeared with a large streak of dried blood, possibly from when he hit his head.

The paramedics arrived quickly and a neighbour who regularly checks on him turned up. More was revealed about the old man's life. The lovely neighbour said he is still quite active. The food in the fridge was still in date. His wife died last year at the age of 96. He is 91. There was a note from the council from a social services visitor who tried to see him last week because she was concerned about his welfare but there was no answer at the door. His family had visited him over the weekend. I wondered to myself why they didn't try and tidy up, maybe run a Hoover over the place or wipe down a few surfaces. Just as I'd made assumptions about the identity of the UKIP voter, I found myself judging people I'd never met.

By this time, there were four paramedics, two builders, the neighbour, the elderly man and myself at the house. We all tried to talk him into going to hospital to get the bump on the head checked out. He was not keen on the idea but in the end, he agreed to it. The paramedics did a spectacular job - caring, professional, patient - exactly the kind of people you'd want to treat you or your own elderly relatives.

And so, apart from popping into the council building before I got on the tube to update the social services department on the situation, my work was done. I'd like to think that anyone would have called the ambulance if they were confronted with the situation of an old man slumped in his own doorway. Please tell me society has not crumbled to such a point that walking on by would be the norm.

And my terrible curiosity about the identity of the UKIP voter was extinguished. The 91-year-old man came to the UK from Poland after WWII. Obviously, I did not choose that vulnerable, fragile moment in his life to ask him why he loves UKIP so much he put a poster in the front window.

I could have pointed out to him that if he arrived in the UK from Poland under a UKIP government, he would be forced to take out private health insurance and not be entitled to NHS care until he'd paid National Insurance for five years. I could have pointed out that there is nothing in UKIP's NHS policy that would prevent further marketisation of NHS services, which may one day result in us getting billed for ambulance journeys. Indeed, at St Helier Hospital, where he was taken, the non-emergency ambulances are already run by the stratospherically incompetent G4S and have caused a needless death.

But of course I did not do this. That would have been a dick move of gargantuan proportions. Instead, we should all be grateful we live in a country where he was treated promptly by highly trained, compassionate medical professionals and he did not receive a hideous bill for his trouble.

Unlike me, they had not spent any time wondering about the UKIP poster, or fighting an urge to knock on his door and ask him hard policy questions, or rolling their eyes at the thought of someone so keen on UKIP, they told the whole street about it via their front window.

They did none of these things. They simply treated him, without fear or favour, without making snap judgements about his politics, as they would any other patient who comes their way in the course of their working day. For that, I am humbled. We should all be vigilant in ensuring we can maintain this level of excellent care. I want to remain living in a country where medical treatment is not determined by wealth, immigration status or political persuasion.

Boris loves Aussies. Well, certain Aussies anyway...

 As an Australian who lives in Britain surely I am overjoyed that Boris Johnson says Britain should welcome Australians in with open arms. Surely, reasons BoJo, that because we're all part of the cosy Commonwealth, Australians should be able to live and work in Britain with the same ease that EU citizens can. After all, despite the Commonwealth being a quaint and archaic hangover from the days of the British Empire, these days it's all so much happier. We all love nothing better than a spot of sporting activity at the Commonwealth Games, it's like a big, old school athletics carnival. Everything is simply marvellous in the Commonwealth!

First, as an Australian and therefore a Commonwealth citizen and someone whose home country has the Queen as head of state, it did seem rather farcical that when I married a British man and wanted to join him in London after living in the Middle East, I had to fly from Abu Dhabi to Sydney, hand over a bunch of paperwork to the British High Commission in Canberra and then wait a couple of weeks for a spouse visa before flying to London. Despite being an avid republican, there surely must be some advantage to being part of the Commonwealth, so I understand Boris's call for closer ties with my native land.

But I do wonder if Boris realises he has perpetuated a few stereotypes that take us right back to the grim days of the White Australia Policy. This was a horrible, shameful era in Australian immigration history and, tragically, one that many Australians are probably nostalgic for today in the wake of the "Stop the boats!" propaganda being peddled by Tony Abbott, the conservative who will probably be the next Australian Prime Minister.

In a piece Boris wrote for newspapers in Australia and Britain, he cites the case of Sally Roycroft, an Australian teacher who has achieved great things in troubled areas of London but will not be sponsored by her employer. As such, she will have to leave Britain despite making a real contribution here. That is an awful situation and, sadly, commonsense does not seem to apply to her immigration status.

But when you read deeper into Boris's diatribe, he talks of how Australians are just like Brits. To prove this point he offers examples such as walking around Sydney and seeing ads for Jamie Oliver recipes, meeting Aussies who watch Top Gear. In short, it is a very white, middle class picture of Australia that has much in common with white, middle class Britain. He then goes on to say that in 1999, Australians voted to retain the Queen as head of state rather than become a republic. Except none of this reflects the broader picture of multicultural Australia or multicultural Britain. And it certainly ignores the harsh reality of life for many indigenous Australians, very few of whom have thrived since Britain first colonised my country.

Of course, it is easy for me to say this with all my white privilege. And if it wasn't for convicts landing in Australia in 1788, I would not have ever existed as an Australian. I'm married to a British man. I can stay here for as long as I like. Good for me! I work here, I pay tax here, I have frequently been told that I am "the kind of migrant we want here" - which usually means "white, not a Muslim, native English speaker, no funny accent, enjoys Fawlty Towers". I'm not likely to be singled out at a tube station by an Home Office official to ensure I am here legally. I am sometimes mistaken for a British woman (although less so, the more I drink).

And it may well be time, as Boris says, to establish a bilateral Free Labour Mobility Zone between Australia and Britain. I can see how that could benefit the labour markets of both countries. Plenty of Eurosceptics would hail this as a victory for commonsense immigration, for more immigrants who "integrate".

But, with Boris's help, they are conjuring up an image of more white Anglo-Australians coming to Britain despite Australians being way more than descendants of convicts from a rat-infested fleet 225 years ago. We are way more diverse and vibrant and interesting than that. Ethnic minorities are growing and education rates are on the rise - a bilateral labour agreement might not produce an influx of Aussies who resemble the cast of Neighbours, despite the BoJo-enhanced stereotypes. And given the disadvantages faced by indigenous Australians, particularly in education, I'd be surprised if such an agreement would enhance their opportunities to work or study in Britain.

Charities such as World Vision and Marie Stopes work in Australia to provide assistance to indigenous Australians where successive governments have failed. Perhaps the people who have suffered as a result of poor educational opportunities, lack of decent healthcare and, in too many cases, blatant racism, could come to Britain as refugees? Or would that be too much for Boris? After all, he picks and chooses which bits of EU membership he likes so why wouldn't he do the same when it comes to Britain's relationship with Australia. Which should include all Australians.




Image courtesy of adamproctor2006