Dishonouring women
Description
Another week, another crackdown - this time in the form of an announcement from the Government about a legal definition of ‘honour’ based abuse and measures that will be introduced in September as statutory guidance.
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The thinking is that these measures will help the police and other agencies recognise when these crimes are being committed, better support the victims and hold perpetrators to account.
The term ‘honour’ when referring to male violence means that the women have brought shame to their husband, family and/or wider community. ‘Honour’ crimes include forced and early marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and murders of women and girls who disobey family patriarchs.
Due to be published in September, the Home Office’s draft definition of violence against women and girls states that child sexual abuse and exploitation is not “explicitly within the scope” of their strategy. This means so-called grooming gangs – typically made up of religious Muslim men – will not be included.
Police miss clues on a regular basis. For example, women living in conservative religious Pakistani or Kurdish communities are controlled not just by their husbands but also the wider family. Another scenario might be a 16-year-old girl in such a household marrying her cousin (which is not, unfortunately, illegal), but where it is obvious that she is unhappy and that coercion or force has been involved.
However, the Home Office’s plan to establish a statutory definition of so-called ‘honour’ crime will surely add more red tape to what could be better dealt with by actively training police and social workers, and a robust implementation of existing laws involving male violence and abuse towards women and girls. Why make a special case of, for example, a murder of a woman by her husband because she has ‘shamed’ him by allegedly having an affair, when Western men use this excuse in court on a regular basis?
Keeping the term ‘honour’ to describe crimes that occur within certain groupings suggests these crimes are unique to particular ethnicities and religions. However, aside from FGM, these crimes are committed across the wider population.
Do we really need more laws to implement what is already a crime? The real problem is that when it comes to child sexual abuse, coercive control and domestic abuse, the authorities rarely prosecute.
To section off behaviours and actions that are already criminal offences against women and girls and call them ‘honour-based crimes’ surely means we are making a special case of crimes committed against women living under Islamic rule? For instance, I doubt that this would help women and girls living in Gypsy and traveller communities where forced and child marriage is rife. There has even been talk in the past to make honour-motivated murder of women and girls an aggravated offence, which would surely only serve to diminish the seriousness of domestic homicide even further.
FGM - which involves the total or partial removal of the external female genitalia for non-medical reasons - is recognised as a violation of human rights. The World Health Organisation describes the practice as reflecting “a deep-rooted inequality between the sexes” and constituting “an extreme form of discrimination against women”.
FGM was first criminalised in the UK in 1985 and the law was later extended to cover girls who are taken out of the UK to be mutilated. But there have only been two convictions, the most recent of which was in October 2023. Everybody either knows or should know what constitutes this crime and who it affects, and it is disgraceful that the Home Office is only now suggesting there should be training on a 40-year-old law that has barely been implemented?
Much has been achieved in exposing the abuse of women living under Islamic law and custom, but there is still a great reluctance to deal with issues such as forced marriage, polygamy and FGM within the criminal justice system. We can no longer pretend it is only a handful of families that practise FGM and we must stop being complacent about the total lack of intervention from our criminal justice system.
Acts of violence, abuse, coercive control, sexual harassment and stalking are already crimes under UK law. It's time that those who carry out these atrocities are investigated, prosecuted and convicted. Violence against women and girls in any context is shameful.
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