Victims Of Honour Killings Remembered

The first memorial day to remember victims of honour killings will be held this week on what would have been a West Yorkshire teenager's birthday.

Bradford born Shafilea Ahmed suffered years of honour based abuse, including an attempted forced marriage when her parents drugged her and flew her to Pakistan.

Her parents eventually suffocated her in front of her siblings for daring to try and live a western lifestyle - bringing ‘shame’ on her family.

An estimated 5,000 women across the world are killed each year for bringing ‘shame’ upon their families; at least 12 of these victims are British. The true number is thought to be far higher as many simply ‘disappear’ or their cases go undetected.

Anup Manota is from the Leeds charity Karma Nirvana - they hope that the annual Day Of Memory will help to raise awareness of honour killings.

“There is a clash of cultures, I don’t think we have to accept that and we would – throughout school – we would educate students that they do have a choice, especially when It comes to marriage and we would hope that communities out there would also relay that message that they do have choices.”

But it might not be something services are aware of. Research found that across jobs such as teaching, policing, nursing and social working, 75% said honour-based abuse has never been covered in their training and only 8% of the 235 people said they ‘definitely’ know the signs to look for in a victim.

It’s something that Karma Nirvana hopes to work on - as they say they get 700 calls for help each month.

“By making stronger stances such as criminalising forced marriage like the government did last year that’s helped victims come forward to seek that help and also we at Karma Nirvana are rolling out a lot of training to police forces.

“It’s not just women it’s men as well. It can be right from the emergency situation where they’ve just ran out the house , they don’t know where to go to and they need our help. Or they could be at the front desk of a police station and the police are asking ‘what can we do for this victim?’”

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