Paul Sheehan; 14/2/09; Review
Daughters Of Shame; Jasvinder Sanghera; Hachette
When Rahan Arshad, a Pakistani living in Britain, decided to bash his wife to death, he bought a baseball bat for the purpose. His wife’s name was Uzma Rahan. Her premeditated murder shocked the public but even more shocking was the appalling complicity and cowardice of the British public sector in the face of so many similar murders. For years, British school teachers, social workers, police officers, immigration officials, academic ideologues, political activists and bureaucrats at all levels had remained silent, inert or deliberately obtuse about the self- evident subculture of violence, bullying, fraud, racism, intimidation and coercion within the British Asian community, all driven by the concept of family “honour”.
See: No Internet Text; The Sydney Morning Herald
Teachers, social workers, police and others were terrified, literally, of the accusation of “racist”. So thousands of women of Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi origin were, and continue to be, murdered, raped, battered, humiliated, isolated, intimidated, disowned, forced into marriages or made complicit in immigration fraud when so many could have been protected. The problem is acute in the Pakistani community, which, not coincidentally, is also the wellspring of Muslim fundamentalism in Britain.
One woman finally broke the membrane of intimidation. Jasvinder Sanghera, born in England to an Indian Sikh migrant family, wrote about her experiences and received a lot of publicity. She then encountered a wall of denial. “A lot of the schools don’t want anything to do with me,” she writes in Daughters Of Shame. “They say the things rm talking about are ‘culturally sensitive’ and they don’t want to upset parents … A girl goes missing, or turns up covered in bruises, and you have your suspicions but it’s always being drummed into us: be careful of cultural sensitivities, steer clear of what you don’t understand. The last thing we want is another accusation of racism.”
Such moral cowardice, especially by “progressive” teachers, is a recurring theme of Daughters Of Shame. This gives the book’s title its triple meaning. It refers not just to the thousands of Asian women in Britain trapped and brutalised but to the national shame of the problem being ignored or denied for decades.
The third meaning is the reference to Sanghera’s first book, Shame, published in 2007, a memoir of her escape, at 16, from a forced marriage and the closed
Sikh community in Derby. It details her elopement, estrangement, rejection and the suicide of a sister, Robina, who burned herself to death after being bullied mercilessly by her husband. At the end of Shame, Sanghera wrote: “Did you know that the suicide rate among young Asian women in Britain is three times the national average? I believe that many of them, like Robina, are driven to kill themselves; it’s just a cleaner, more convenient form of murder.”
In 2007, Shame was a bestseller in Britain, Sanghera was honoured as Britain’s Woman of the Year and the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act became law, giving the state the power to pre-empt forced marriages. The ensuing Forced Marriage Unit is contacted by about 5000 people a year.
Two years later, Sanghera returns to the fray with Daughters Of Shame. Although she widens her lens, the sequel is not weighed down with statistics or polemic. Rather, in a briskly written narrative, she lays down story after story of her experiences with other Asian women, largely through the Karma Nirvana women’s centre that she set up in Derby to help woman escaping from forced marriages, violent husbands or oppressive families.
What shocks is the scale of the persecution.
Last year, the Association of Chief Police Officers estimated that at least 17,000 “honour” crimes are committed in Britain every year and the number of young Asian women subject to forced marriages, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder is up to 35 times higher than official figures.
These figures do not appear in Sanghera’s book but this is the hidden terrain of Daughters Of Shame. She writes about the women who come through the door of Karma Nirvana or phone the hotline. She puts flesh on the bones of what is barely hinted at in the official statistics: “Wearing lipstick, owning a mobile phone, cutting your hair; any of these things could be said to bring dishonour on a family because those are all signs that a girl is getting Westernised, which is what Asian families fight so hard against.”
She writes of Sajida Bibi, murdered on her wedding day, because she, not her family, chose her husband. She writes that one in every three rail suicides in Britain takes place on the London Paddington track between Slough and Southall, two predominantly Asian suburbs. All the suicides are Asian women.
One would assume, as Britain absorbs the third generation of immigrant families from South Asia, that this cultural divide would be eroding with time.
The statistics say otherwise. Near the end of Daughters Of Shame, Sanghera surveys her world, sees a violent struggle going on over the rights and freedoms of women, especially in the Muslim community, and concludes: “I think it’s getting worse.”
Tags: Honor Killing, UK, Womens Rights