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“I’m always looking over my shoulder. I’m never going to let my guard down,” Bekhal Mahmod said.
For two decades she has been in hiding, living under a new identity, away from her Iraqi-Kurdish family. In 2007 Bekhal testified in the trial of her father and uncle for the “honour”-based murder of her sister Banaz Mahmod.
Banaz, 20, had left her arranged marriage and wanted to marry another man. She had told police of the violence and threats she was facing but had been dismissed by an female officer as manipulative and melodramatic.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of her killing.
After years of campaigning, Bekhal is hoping the UK government will finally adopt “Banaz’s law” – proposals that include creating a statutory definition of “honour”-based abuse, informed by survivors – to ensure professionals get better at spotting the signs, victims feel empowered to come forward, and perpetrators are brought to justice.
“[Banaz’s murder] will never leave my life,” she added. “It can take the smallest things, like somebody saying the word Iraq … my head turns instantly, it’s a fear.”
Peers tabled amendments to the crime and policing bill last month urging ministers to adopt Banaz’s law proposals, which the government has said it will consider.
However, Bekhal fears the UK’s fraught migration debate could deter victims of “honour”-based abuse from coming forward.
Bekhal and her four sisters were subjected to violent abuse throughout their childhoods, escalating when the family moved to the UK in 1998.
Against the backdrop of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the 2000s, fuelling the rise of the far-right British National party, Bekhal felt society was not on her side.
She said: “I had indefinite leave to remain but I feared [the authorities] weren’t going to take me seriously or help me, that they were just going to see me as just an immigrant using our funds and our system. I worry, 100%, that the climate now could prevent women from coming forward today.”
Sanskriti Sanghi, a campaigns manager at Southall Black Sisters (SBS), the women’s organisation that has been advocating for Banaz’s law, said the way migration – rather than misogyny – has been framed as a threat to women and girls is ultimately “damaging” to women’s safety.
Sanghi said: “Violence against women and girls [VAWG] is being weaponised by the far right to further a racist and anti-migrant agenda and that marginalises communities and the most vulnerable within them, reducing trust and faith in the system.
“There are these damaging myths being put out about violence against women and girls, that the greatest risk comes from migrant men who are strangers, when it’s most likely to be someone known to the victim, and perpetrators cut across all ethnicities.”
Nonetheless, “honour”-based violence is a type of VAWG closely linked to cultural contexts.
Banaz’s law proposes that defendants are prevented from using “honour” as a defence; that “honour”-based abuse is explicitly recognised as an aggravating factor in sentencing, backed by statutory guidance shaped by women and campaigners with experience of the abuse and its various cultural contexts.
SBS is also campaigning for the government to extend the UK’s migrant victims of domestic abuse concession and indefinite leave to remain domestic violence provisions to all migrant women, regardless of immigration status, aimed at protecting women from the “impossible choice” of an abusive relationship on one hand, or destitution or deportation on the other, because their migration status is precarious, or prevents them accessing public funds.
In a House of Lords debate last month, the Liberal Democrat peer Dee Doocey described Banaz’s murder as “emblematic of wider patterns of institutional failure to identify and respond to ‘honour’-based abuse”, calling for “a statutory definition to be brought forward” quickly.
Alison Levitt, a justice minister in the Lords, said while the government did not think making “honour”-based abuse a statutory aggravating factor in sentencing would be either “necessary or desirable … when existing guidelines already apply”, she would “welcome further discussion as to how we can achieve the objectives”.
Levitt said the government had committed to introducing statutory guidance on “honour”-based abuse, alongside a statutory definition, but needed to ensure “the range of abuse experienced is captured and that we do not build in any unintended consequences … We must do this once and we must get it right.”
She added while she was unable to give the debate a timeline or say whether the bill “will be used as a suitable legislative vehicle”, the government was “getting on with this work … quickly.”
