Women's Views on News |
- ‘Honour killing’: we will remember them
- Justice campaigners win award
- Sylvia Pankhurst at the Tate Britain
- UK rape reports increase, charges decrease
| ‘Honour killing’: we will remember them Posted: 12 Feb 2014 07:42 AM PST
TRIGGER WARNING: THIS IS VERY UPSETTING. The United Nations conservatively estimates that worldwide 5,000 women and girls are killed each year by members of their own family, often fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins – and sometimes by mothers and other female relatives. Women are murdered in Britain, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Iran, Iraq, Denmark, France – all across the world. About 12 each year in the UK, 1000 in India, 1000 in Pakistan. These killings, known as 'honour killings', are usually premeditated murders intended to restore a family's social position and 'honour' by 'cleansing the shame' which a woman or girl is said to have brought upon the family, by erasing her very existence. These killings occur in societies where men's status is judged by their ability to control women's behaviour. Women can become targets of 'honour based violence' for choosing their own life partner, for spending time without family supervision, for leaving a marriage, for becoming the subject of gossip, for becoming 'Westernised' and many other ‘reasons’. Gay men are also targets, and occasionally the man with whom a woman is connected 'inappropriately' will be murdered as well. A core purpose of honour killings is to remove all existence of the victims. Memini intends to do the opposite. Memini is a global digital initiative driven entirely by volunteers internationally to promote remembrance of victims of honour killings worldwide. Memini means 'I remember' in Latin, and the Memini initiative documents the stories of young women and men globally who have lost their lives in the name of family and community honour. It is the largest database of stories of cases of honour killings on the internet. Norwegian artist and activist Deeyah founded Memini in early 2011. The intention is to make sure that the that shame falls where it is deserved: on the murderers. It cannot be easy to murder your own daughter – silence and acquiescence in the face of brutality is the main thing that makes it possible. ‘Memini exists to acknowledge the lives and deaths of thousands who are killed in 'honour' killings,’ Deeyah, the founder of Memini, explains on the site. ‘We seek to create a community of remembrance to end the silence, to honour the dead and to keep their memories alive. To ensure that the stories of the victims of honour killings are told, and defy the intent of those who wanted to erase them.’ Deeyah’s Emmy-award wining film Banaz: A Love Story is the account of an “honour” killing in south London in January 2006 when Banaz Mahmod, aged 20, was murdered by her family. She was raped and strangled and her body was buried in a suitcase. The film is now to be shown as part of the UK’s police training programmes to educate officers on the real threat that face many young women in Britain. Banaz went five times to the police to ask for their help and tell them she believed her life was at risk. She even named her future killers on videotape with the words: “If anything happens to me, it’s them.” ‘Honour’ killings and forced marriages are not a Muslim thing, Deeyah pointed out in an interview with the Guardian, "They happen in Sikh, in Hindu, even in Christian societies structured so that the rights of the group are enforced at the expense of the individual.” Banaz is not the only young woman to died in ‘honour based violence’ in the UK. Fifteen-year-old Kurdish girl Tulay Goren was killed in North London by her father because the family objected to her choice of husband. Ten years after she vanished, her mother Hanim agreed to tell the court the truth about her violent husband Mehmet, and said: 'In the children's bedroom I saw Tulay lying on the floor face down. Her hands and her feet were tied. Her hands and her feet were all a purple black colour. [Her sister and I] tried to untie her, and Tulay said: 'Mum don't untie me, I want to die'. In the meantime Mehmet had come from downstairs and said don't untie, don't touch he said." Hanim Goren continued: "After that Mehmet said: 'So that she doesn't run away again I have tied her up'." Mehment had been arrested when Tulay vanished on 7 January 1999, but lied his way out of trouble and forced his family to do the same. He was only brought to justice by the damning testimony of the mother and sister Tulay left behind. Six year-old Alisha Begum suffered 95 per cent burns in an arson attack on her home, and died. In September 2006 a Birmingham Crown Court heard that the arson attack was planned by Hussain Ahmed, a 26 year-old dentist, and his friend Daryll Tuzzio, 18, after Ahmed found out his 15 year-old sister was seeing Alisha's brother, Abdul Hamid. Surjit Kaur Athwal, 28, sought to end an unhappy marriage by divorce. In 1998 her mother-in-law and husband took her from London to India under false pretences where she was killed. She had two children. Her husband and mother-in-law were only convicted of her murder after a landmark trial which was the result of more than eight years of constant, tireless campaigning. ‘Ali’ in a comment on Memini’s memorial page said: ‘Although I've been aware of honour killings taking place in modern society for some time, I wasn't aware of its prevalence or details of the ways it is carried out until after I saw the film The Stoning of Soraya M, based on the book by Freidoune Sahebjam. ‘I did some research on the internet which led me to the Violence Is Not Our Culture and several other sites, and eventually to this site, [Memini] a wonderful tribute to these women whose lives have been taken and wasted in the most tragic of circumstances, most often by members of their own families.’ Stories and content will be added as Memini becomes aware of a murder. Please write to Memini if you are aware of a person who has been killed who has not already been documented.  |
| Posted: 12 Feb 2014 06:41 AM PST
The third IKWRO True Honour Awards 2014 saw three campaigners awarded joint winners following the tragic loss of their relative to ‘honour based violence‘. Jagdeesh Singh, Pavenpreet Ahmed and Sarbjit Kaur Athwal all received recognition at the True Honour Awards for their fight for justice following the murder of the young woman who was their sister, mother and sister-in-law respectively. The Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO) was set up to protect Middle Eastern and Afghan women and girls who are at risk of 'honour based violence’, forced marriage, child marriage, female genital mutilation and domestic violence and to promote their rights. The three joint winners are united by a tragedy which has resulted in brave fights for justice for a dead member of their family – and for all women who face 'honour based violence’. Jagdeesh Singh is a strong, persistent campaigner against 'honour based violence’, seeking justice for victims of 'honour killings’. His sister, Surjit Kaur Athwal, was in an unhappy, violent marriage and decided to seek a divorce. However, she was tricked into travelling to North India, on the premise of attending a family wedding, where she was murdered in an 'honour killing’, arranged by her mother-in-law and husband. That was in 1998. Singh felt compelled to seek justice and speak out about what had happened to his sister and others like her. In the face of fierce opposition from some in his community he continues to expose the issue, calling for community leaders, influential religious groups and local language newspapers to break their silence and play their part in ending these so-called ‘honour killings’. Almost 10 years after Surjit's murder, her husband and mother-in-law were convicted and received life sentences. This was the first conviction in the UK for an outsourced 'honour killing’, and the high profile trial, which Singh did all he could to publicise, helped to bring focus to the issue. The contract killers who carried out Surjit's murder in India have not yet been brought to justice. Singh and his family are calling for the Indian and British governments to make this happen too, and have written to Prime Minister David Cameron, calling on him to press the Indian authorities into action and to seek a UK inquiry into the case and others of its kind. The second joint winner, Pavanpreet Ahmed, campaigns for justice for her mother, Surjit Kaur Athwal, along with her uncle, Jagdeesh Singh, and her mother's sister-in-law, Sarbjit Kaur Athwal. Fourteen years later, Ahmed organised a memorial event at the House of Commons on the anniversary of her mother's disappearance. It was attended by over 100 guests, among whom were members of the Metropolitan police, representatives of women's rights organisations and Members of Parliament. At the event Ahmed and her family called on the British government to press the Indian government to bring Surjit's murderers in India to justice. Sarbjit Kaur Athwal was Surjit Kaur Athwal's sister-in-law and was just 18 when she got married and moved into her husband’s family's strict home. Their mother-in-law treated the two daughters-in-law like servants. Surjit was the more rebellious of the two and was regularly beaten for her disobedience. When the family found out that Surjit was having an affair they took her to a family wedding in India, where her mother-in-law arranged for her to be drugged, strangled and thrown into a river. When Kaur Athwal found out what had happened to her sister-in-law she was terrified – and she was told that if she breathed a word, the same thing would happen to her. For the sake of her life and her family, she kept silent, but the stress nearly killed her and finally, after lying in hospital fearing she might die, she told her parents what had happened. Finally, with Kaur Athwal’s help, the mother-in-law and Surjit's husband were arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Sarbjit Kaur Athwal became the first person within a family connected with an 'honour killing’ to go into open court, waiving her anonymity so she could speak out and to break the notions of 'shame' that had killed her sister-in-law. Although she has since faced intimidation and threats from her community, she has refused to be silent. She joined the Metropolitan Police Service in hope of helping other victims like herself and published her account in a book called ‘Shamed‘ in June 2013. Together with Pavanpreet Ahmed, she hosted a meeting at Parliament to raise awareness and keep the issue of 'honour killings’ at the forefront of everybody's mind. She has now set up an organisation called ‘Your Voice’ to help support others facing abuse. A special award was given to Karma Nirvana to celebrate and acknowledge the 21 years of incredible passion the organisation has committed to the fight against 'honour based violence’.  |
| Sylvia Pankhurst at the Tate Britain Posted: 12 Feb 2014 04:09 AM PST
A display about Sylvia Pankhurst at London’s Tate Britian, devised by curator Emma Chambers with The Emily Davison Lodge as part of the Tate’s Spotlight series is up and running – until 23 March. Sylvia Pankhurst trained at the Manchester Municipal School of Art where she won a host of awards before gaining a 2-year scholarship to the Royal College of Art – with the distinction of having the highest grades of any candidate. She went on to be a key figure in the work of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) set up with her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel in 1903, using her artistic skills to further the cause. Pankhurst's lifelong interest was in the rights of working women, and she used her artistic skills in the fight for women's rights, designing badges, banners and flyers, and recording the lives of working women. In 1907 she spent several months touring industrial communities documenting the working and living conditions of women workers. Living in the communities she studied, she painted and wrote about industrial processes and the women who performed them. Working in gouache, which she found ideal for working quickly under factory conditions, her studies of women at work were unusual for the time in their unsentimental observation and their focus on individual workers. Pankhurst's detailed account of working conditions and wages was published as an illustrated article 'Women Workers of England' in the London Magazine in November 1908, and as a series of articles on individual trades in the WSPU journal Votes for Women between 1908 and 1911. Her combination of artworks with written accounts provided a vivid picture of the lives of women workers and made a powerful argument for improvement in working conditions and pay equality with men. Writing about the 'pit-brow lassies' of Wigan Pankhurst said: 'In spite of their great strength and the arduous labours they perform, they are, like most other women workers, very poorly paid… 'A bankswoman earns from 1s 10d to 2s 4d; whilst a banksman, doing exactly the same work gets from 4s 9d to 5s a day. 'It is this question of underpayment that is at the root of most of the hardship and suffering.' Pankhurst's designs for the WSPU quickly evolved from depicting women workers in a socialist realist style, as seen on an early membership card which reflects the origins of the WSPU in the Manchester labour movement. She began to develop more symbolic representations of the organisation's ideals and values, designing several key images which were extensively used on printed materials, banners, badges and crockery. All of these were executed in the WSPU colours of purple, white and green, introduced by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence in 1908 and symbolising dignity, purity and hope. Pankhurst designed badges, banners and flyers for the WSPU. Her most widely used work was her symbolic 'angel of freedom' blowing a trumpet, which became an essential element of the visual image of the campaign, alongside the WSPU colours of white, green and purple. Others included a woman breaking free from prison gates, stepping over broken chains and carrying a 'votes for women' streamer, and a woman sowing the seeds of emancipation. As the suffrage campaign intensified she struggled to balance her artistic and political work, and in 1912 she gave up art to devote herself to the East London Federation of Suffragettes, the organisation she founded to ensure that working-class women were represented in the suffrage campaign. Pankhurst was one of many women artists involved in creating designs for the suffrage campaign and active in militant protest. She was imprisoned many times and endured weeks and months of hunger, thirst and sleep strikes in Holloway Prison. She wrote several books, including a book calling on the reform of maternity care, Save the Mothers, published in 1930, a history of the struggle for the vote, The Suffrage Movement, published in 1931 and an account of her war experiences in the East End, The Home Front published in 1932. She was active in politics throughout her life. She moved to Ethiopia in 1956, where she helped to found the Social Service Society and edited a monthly periodical, the Ethiopia Observer, and died in Addis Ababa, on 27 September 1960.  |
| UK rape reports increase, charges decrease Posted: 12 Feb 2014 01:09 AM PST
Following several newly published reports and data sets, activists around the world are calling for a complete rethink of the way gender-based violence is dealt with. And recent events emphasise the urgent need for such a change in the UK too. For one of these reports was the publication in the UK of information showing wide variation across England and Wales in the policing of rape cases. At the end of last month, police data on the number of rapes recorded by each of the 43 police forces and the outcomes was published by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) on behalf of the Rape Monitoring Group (RMG). This is the first time both sets of data have been published together, and as well as informing the public of the situation in any given area, the data will help the wider criminal justice community see trends over time of recorded rape. To view the reports, click here. In response to the publication, Professor Liz Kelly, co-chair of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), said: 'The wide disparities between different areas' reporting, detection and 'no crime' rates… must be urgently tackled [because] the police play a critical role [in] enabling rape survivors to access justice.' A few days after HMIC released the data, an investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalists for The Independent found that since 2011, the number of rape cases referred by the police to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for charging decisions has fallen by a third – despite a three per cent rise in reported rapes over the period. It appears likely that the fall in referrals is due to a change made in 2011 to CPS guidelines, a change which put more emphasis on police forces identifying and stopping cases where the threshold for charging would not be met. While the CPS says the changes were of language not substance, it seems that interpretation of the guidelines may have changed. The CPS told the Independent: 'We are exploring the reasons for the drop in rape referrals with the police. This will include looking at the appropriate interpretation and application of the guidance and the evidential standard of case files.' The investigation found that in almost three-quarters of cases where the number of rape referrals by police forces has dropped, the number of charges made by the CPS has also dropped. But when referrals have gone up, the number of charges has risen in all cases. Low rates of reporting rape and other gender-based violence are well-known, and a recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that only seven per cent of women around the world who experienced violence ever reported it to a formal source such as a doctor, justice system or social service provider. One of the authors of that study, Amber Peterman, assistant research professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said she was especially struck that the reporting rates were so low even with the recent progress made in research, advocacy and publicity about the prevalence and harmful consequences of gender-based violence, particularly after the international fury over the rape and death of Jyoti Singh in New Delhi in December 2012. The research also found that although the rate of informal reporting to family and friends dwarfs the rate of official reporting, it is still distressingly low, at less than 37 per cent. Lori Heise, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said those informal reports are most often given to a group she calls 'first responders.' She said that the latest findings 'challenge the current investment or strategy that has been used globally in trying to reform formal institutional responses' and that a more effective approach would be to focus resources on the networks of first responders. Rape Crisis responsed to HMIC's publication by referring to another type of first responder, saying that 'We hope the data released will remind Police and Crime Commissioners and others of the crucial importance of ensuring access to specialist sexual violence services through sustainable funding.' Such a reminder is much needed, as organisations such as the Edinburgh Women's Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (EWRASAC) appeal for financial support in the context of continued public funding cuts. Sadly, the reforming of institutional responses in England isn't working, as was made abundantly clear after Tracy Shelvey killed herself days after a man was cleared of raping her. She had given evidence in two separate trials, and in the re-trial her alleged attacker was found not guilty of raping her and two other women. Shelvey's death came a year after violinist Frances Andrade killed herself after giving lengthy, traumatic evidence in a case against her former music teacher, who was, after her death, found guilty of indecent assault. Tony Lloyd, police and crime commissioner for Greater Manchester, said, 'The court process is brutal. Many, many rape victims say that the court process is as traumatic as their original ordeal. 'This can't go on – a root and branch review of how victims and witnesses are treated is urgently needed. 'We need to ensure that victims and witnesses are surround by support.' Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester police, said, 'If your house is burgled, nobody says it's your fault because the front door is open. 'If you're a victim of rape or sexual offences there is a massive focus on your credibility, your character, your emotions, what you did on the night, what you were wearing, your other relationships.' The survivor of an act of violence, who is not officially on trial, should not be forced to bear the burden of proof of innocence rather than the perpetrator. Ravi Verma, regional director of the Asia regional office of the International Centre for Research on Women, is among several high profile figures, including US President Barack Obama, who recently called for men to shoulder their share of the burden of prevention of gender-based violence. Verma said that to really address violence against women, it is necessary to 'get into primary prevention work.' By that he means expanding 'the gender discourse beyond women's empowerment. 'We have always presented equality from the perspective of giving agency to women, without bothering to normalise man's responsibility in achieving gender equality.' One of the most obvious methods to begin making that change is through the media. Following the recent ‘not guilty’ verdict in a high profile trial of a UK TV actor on charges of rape and indecent assault, EVAW and Rape Crisis appealed for 'less sensational media reporting and a joint commitment to challenging myths and stereotypes about rape and other forms of sexual violence.'  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Women's Views on News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |