Responses to honour based violence in the UK

By the Iranian and Kurdish Women s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) Introduction IKWRO is a registered charity which provides advice, support, referrals and advocacy to Middle Eastern women and girls living in the UK who are facing honour based violence (herein HBV) and other forms of abuse. We also advise other agencies on specific cases and provide training for public and voluntary organisations to enable them to better understand and support our clients. In 2006 we began campaigning for improvements in the national HBV response after the death of Banaz Mahmod. 20 year-old Banaz was murdered on the orders of her father and uncle. She had told police four times that her family were planning to kill her but she was not taken seriously. Since Banaz s death there have been improvements in how HBV is dealt with. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) launched an HBV strategy in 2008, and HBV is now included in police risk assessments. It is also recognised in national policies such as the coalition s Call to End Violence against Women and Girls and in the violence against women strategies of some local authorities. However there are still significant gaps in the national HBV response, particularly around awareness among frontline staff in statutory bodies, data on the scale of HBV in the UK and policies and practices within different branches of government which can actually make life more difficult for survivors of HBV. Underlying all of these gaps is a lack of focussed and consistent leadership. 1. Awareness among frontline staff in statutory bodies Getting the right information to frontline staff in bodies such as the police, health and education providers and safeguarding children services is essential to ensure that they are able to identify and adequately protect victims of HBV. This was recognised by the ACPO HBV strategy in 2008 and more recently by the coalition government s Call to end violence against women and girls, which stated: We need to ensure that there is effective action to prevent (HBV). It is important that (women and girls) are able to seek the support which is most appropriate to them. This could be from a hospital, a school, the police, a housing service, a voluntary agency or from family and friends . The action plan went on to pledge that the government would work on the de velopment of learning programmes for the Police. This reflects commitments made three years previously in the ACPO HBV strategy, which flagged provision of training as a priority. Indeed, part of the vision of that strategy was that the police service provides an appropriate response on every occasion our help is sought; recognising and responding effectively to risk and holding offenders to account . Despite the improvements which have been made since the release of ACPO s strategy, IKWRO has found that Police officers are still turning away HBV victims, approaching their families or spouses and disclosing details of their whereabouts to their abusers on a regular basis. y A young woman in Haringey reported her father to the police for threatening to kill her after learning that she had a boyfriend. The father denied the threats, and the police believed him. They

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allowed him to take his daughter home and told IKWRO that they were not worried as the girl was now happy for her father to arrange a marriage for her. We took a client who was facing HBV, including death threats, to Barnet Police Station. The first officer we saw was utterly dismissive of the woman s complaints and had no understanding of HBV and the level of risk posed to the woman by her family. Our advisor had to fight to get the police to class the woman as high risk. A woman went to West Drayton police to report threats by her husband to throw acid in her face and to kill her. The police didn t even take a statement and instead went directly to the woman s husband who naturally denied the claims. The police then said that they could not proceed as there was not enough evidence. We had to fight with them just to get them to take the client s statement, and even after this they still didn t press charges. In one case Manchester Police refused to take a high risk HBV client to a refuge. We had to phone them and argue very strongly with them before they would agree to do this. On other occasions, they have taken a long time to follow reports up, haven t returned calls, have been arrogant and rude and have refused to cooperate with us. A client had to flee her husband and was at high risk of HBV. She received excellent treatment from her local police outside London and was quickly moved to safe accommodation in Haringey. However Haringey Police then phoned the woman s husband alerting him to the fact that the woman was living in Haringey and putting her in danger. Another woman was moved to Haringey after death threats from her brothers for resisting a forced marriage and again the police sent a card detailing numbers that the woman should call in an emergency to her brother, alerting him to the woman s whereabouts. A police interpreter in Islington disclosed details of an HBV case to the community. When we raised this, the police dismissed our fears that this posed a risk to the victim s safety.

These examples illustrate that information on HBV has not reached frontline officers and staff. Training is urgently needed. In November the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) consulted IKWRO on a training module on HBV. Since then we have heard nothing, and our contact at the NPIA does not know what is happening. We are concerned that cuts to policing budgets and to NPIA funding could prevent the training module from going any further. It is vital that pressure is maintained on the Home Office and ACPO to ensure that they quickly roll out the training which is clearly needed. Training is also needed beyond the police. Other statutory agencies have a vital role to play in tackling HBV, but bad practice persists across the board, including; y A mental health worker in Bury was dealing with an Afghan woman who had fled forced marriage and domestic violence. The woman was now living with her husband s brother and the worker was using him as a translator. The mental health worker had accepted his assurances that the woman had no further needs, and the woman had been discharged. y Social workers in Barnet returned a 16 year old at high risk of forced marriage to her father, who carried out his plans. The girl ran away and social services do not know where she is. y A nurse in Brent admitted a woman s family to see her after she had given birth arguing that they had a right to see their daughter . The woman had kept her pregnancy from them and IKWRO had

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y y

advised the hospital not to admit the family because of the HBV risk. The young woman has since given her baby up for adoption and her family have taken her overseas. A number of housing authorities across the country refused to help clients who had had to leave home because of HBV, arguing that they were voluntarily homeless . A Housing Officer in Southwark refused to display a poster advertising IKWRO s services because she said it would offend men . Receptionists in several GP surgeries in Southwark were also reticent to display posters. A student counsellor in a London college with many Muslim students admitted that although she had a large number of forced marriage cases she had never phoned the police or FMU. When asked what help she offered, she told us she provided a shoulder to cry on .

Before Christmas the Home Office circulated a questionnaire to assess the provision of services to deal with HBV and other harmful traditional practices at local level. The results have not yet been made public, but the Home Office s action plan pledges to review the findings and to identify models of effective practice to share with local areas, particularly those where awareness and activity to tackle forms of HBV is low . As well as sharing of best practice, targeted training on HBV must be provided to bodies which are failing to enable them to improve their HBV response. IKWRO has recently offered training to local authorities in London and the uptake has been very high, but we cannot train everyone. A more systematic approach is needed, led by central government, in order to ensure that victims of HBV get the support they need. 2. Improved data collection The Home Office estimates that there are 12 honour killings per year in the UK although it is unclear where that figure comes from. Certainly, the number of women who suffer other forms of HBV is much higher. In 2010 the Forced Marriage Unit dealt with over 1700 cases of forced marriage, and from April to October 2009 the police recorded 211 honour based incidents in London alone, 129 of which were crimes. While all police forces are supposed to flag honour related incidents in their recording systems, Freedom of Information requests revealed that in 2010 several were still not doing this, including Gloucestershire, West Mercia and Cheshire. Moreover, while the Metropolitan Police have begun to release figures for incidence of HBV in London, ACPO have not produced any national data. It is vital that ACPO make efforts to draw together data from the different police forces and that they release this information to the public. Segmenting of information so that the type of crime recorded can be seen, as well as whether there has been any charge or conviction (or in the case of forced marriage whether a Forced Marriage Protection Order has been issued) will help to ensure an informed HBV response across the country. At the same time, the figures for crimes and incidents recorded by police may not reflect the true scale of the problem, with many incidents going unreported to the authorities. Voluntary and community organisations may have further data which could help to inform the national picture. There is a need for a more strategic approach to data collection on national incidence of HBV. Understanding the scale of the problem and pinpointing worst affected areas are vital to delivering an

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effective response. We recommend that the Home Office undertakes a study to quantify the true scale of HBV in the UK, working with partners in the police and statutory and voluntary bodies. 3. Ensuring that all government bodies are responding appropriately In addition to low awareness of HBV among some public sector staff, policy and practice within some government departments is also impeding the response to HBV. For example, many local authorities will only re-house a woman when she can show evidence of physical violence. In HBV cases threats, psychological violence and emotional abuse are often a precursor to murder, forced suicide or forced marriage. Where these forms of violence occur the victim should be moved immediately in order to ensure her safety. The current practice within many local authorities of only recognising physical violence conflicts with the Home Office definition of domestic violence and was the subject of the recent Yemshaw case in the Supreme Court. It is vital that the Department for Communities and Local Government actively address local level blocks as part of the cross-government response to HBV. 4. Leadership There are individuals within the Violence and Youth Crime Prevention Unit and the Forced Marriage Unit whose portfolio includes work on HBV. ACPO also has dedicated staff in this area and has made significant progress since the introduction of their HBV strategy in 2008. However, the HBV response would benefit from a more clearly defined leadership. The ACPO strategy identifies the police as a lead player in a partnership made up of government, statutory agencies at national and local level, voluntary sector organisations, and communities. However the police are not providing this leadership at present. The national HBV Forum previously chaired by ACPO - has not been convened since 2009 and there has been no public reporting on the progress made againstcommitments contained in ACPO s HBV strategy. Voluntary organisations including IKWRO have raised our concerns about this with the Home Office and Forced Marriage Unit. Within government, there is also some confusion around the role of the Forced Marriage Unit, with some decision makers making the assumption that HBV comes under its remit. In fact the Forced Marriage Act and related statutory guidance and guidelines for professionals are very clearly limited to dealing with cases of forced marriage and do not cover the many other forms of HBV. Similarly the Forced Marriage Unit s guidelines for professionals do not go much further than defining HBV and certainly do not deal with the other forms in depth. Some statutory bodies may feel that they have done HBV if they have rolled out the forced marriage guidelines but in fact this is not the case. We recommend that the issue of leadership on HBV is addressed with urgency to ensure that work in this , area can be taken forward. One way to do this would be through the creation of an HBV Coordinator post. Given the close links and overlap between HBV and forced marriage, this post might sit within the Forced Marriage Unit but would be specifically tasked with leading on issues related to HBV, including provision of training, improvement of data and streamlining of other government policies, as set out above We . understand the difficulty of arguing for new posts in the current political climate, but by introducing a coordinator role the government will be able to adopt a more focussed and strategic approach to HBV which will pay for itself in the long term.

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