Ep 51. A Crime Nobody Is Required to Notice

Welcome to the This Is The North Podcast, your source of transformative conversations. An intentional challenge to the systems holding back the North of England. Hosted by Alison Dunn MBE, an award-winning charity chief executive and former solicitor. This podcast is supported by the Society Matters Foundation and is dedicated to curating and sharing knowledge, powering the change we need for a more equal and inclusive society.

In this episode, Alison sits down with Ameera Jamil, founder and CEO of Recultured, who has spent her career supporting victims of forced marriage and honour-based abuse, first on the front line at Karma Nirvana and now training the professionals to recognise the signs and act on them. It is a conversation about a form of abuse that survives on silence, and about the institutions that still have nowhere to record it.

Ameera is precise about what this is, and none of it is comfortable. Honour-based abuse is harm inflicted to restore a family's so-called honour, and the list of what counts as dishonourable has no end, because each family writes its own: make-up, Western clothes, who you marry, whether you marry at all. The stereotypical victim is South Asian and Muslim; the reality reaches into any culture. What victims fear most is disownment; Ameera has had people tell her they would rather be hit than cut off. And where domestic abuse is done by a partner or an ex, honour-based abuse is done by parents, siblings and a community together: a fifteen-year-old fitted for a wedding dress, examined to prove her virginity, and not one adult asking a single question.

Around 3,000 honour-based crimes are reported in the UK each year, a figure practitioners describe as the tip of the iceberg. Ameera's research into universities shows why so much stays hidden. Over ninety per cent have no reporting category for honour-based abuse, forced marriage or FGM. Over sixty per cent offer no specific training. And when a student stops attending, the next of kin the university rings can be the very person who forced the marriage.

This year, for the first time, honour-based abuse was given its own statutory definition in law. On 14 July, the National Day of Memory, campaigned for by Karma Nirvana, remembers everyone lost or harmed in the name of honour. It falls on the birthday of Shafilea Ahmed. She was seventeen when her parents murdered her, and her case is one this conversation returns to more than once. Survivors will speak, stories will be told, and we will remember.

Timestamps:

00:00 The fear worse than violence

01:18 What honour-based abuse actually is

03:45 The tip of the iceberg

09:43 The fear of disownment

11:42 Shafilea Ahmed

17:30 Careful curiosity: the signs professionals miss