Wide Angle 20 - Daughters Of Shame

This is about a fantastic book I read a couple of weeks by a lady called Jasvinder Sanghera (Jas) titled “Daughters Of Shame”. I had known that something like this existed in Britain but this book really shocked me into the whole concept of “Honor Killings” and “Forced Marriages”. Jas is a Sikh lady who grew up in the UK and who runs a charity called “Karma Nirvana” for the help of South Asian Women in UK. Her first book called “Shame” was a best seller which told her own story, through Daughters of Shame she has brought out the stories of many other girls who shaped Karma Nirvana and freed themselves.
The issue at heart of all this is the concept of Honor or Shame that is the cornerstone of every Asian household, the very old “Log Kya Kahenge” (What will people say?). And as is the wont, it is the daughter of the house who has to bear the burden of the Honor. The book is about many girls in the UK who though being raised in the West are totally kept away from that culture at home because their parents don’t want the “Evil/corrupt” ways of the Whites to influence their girls. The girls are only allowed to go to school and once they are home, they change into an Asian attire, watch only Bollywood movies and are encouraged to learn cooking and sewing. The moment they are of a marriageable age i.e. thirteen and above, they are forced into marriage with a boy they don’t know at all, mostly from the mother country (so that the boy can get a residence in UK) and left stranded in unhappy marriages or end up committing suicide.
Jas’s own sister Robina was forced into an unhappy marriage and she became so miserable that she committed suicide by burning herself. Jas grew up knowing that she would be forced to marry someone like her sister had and when she resisted, she was beaten and abused. Jas had the courage to walk out of her home and begin a new life and eventually formed Karma Nirvana where she helps such girls who are stranded escape and start a new life. Karma Nirvana has been so successful that it has rescued hundreds of girls from being forced into marriage, has forced public opinion against forced marriage thus helping to pass a legislation in UK against it and has started several education programs for the police force and teachers to identify signs of forced marriage and act with compassion for the girls. Jas even won the Woman Of the Year award in the UK for these efforts.
I have already described the pattern that gets followed when the girl becomes of a marriageable age and parents start planning trips to their homeland for marrying off their girls. What also compounds the problems is that crimes carried out due to this (I will cite examples below) for e.g. Honor Killing or kidnapping of the girl by her family once she has left home are treated with kid gloves by policemen or judges on the pretext of being “culturally sensitive”. The white society fails to understand the importance of honor in the Asian community and extent to which people would go to preserve it many times resorting to crime (e.g. murdering the daughter for having an affair”). Many a times, policemen turn away girls who have come to ask for help against a forced marriage or if they see a threat to their lives thinking that it is a family problem and “How can parents threaten their own children”. Jas has tirelessly through the years reached out to hundreds of police precincts explaining this concept thus succeeding in getting a better response for the girls from the policemen. Another factor that works against the girls is the so called “Asian Network”. Asians on the police force more often than not tend to side with the families since they understand the Honor concept and most of the times, they are sent to help the girl by superiors since they are seen to understand the “culture”.
The routine in cases where the girl manages to get away from such a situation is that she calls up Karma Nirvana and Jas or someone else calls up the local policemen who then reach the girls house and escort her out of the house and to a Women’s refuge while her parents and family are screaming their hearts out at her. From here, the journey of loneliness for the girl begins. So far, she has had financial security, a warm family environment which is suddenly denied to her and to top that she has to move around lest her family finds her and brings her back. Many girls are unable to cope with the pressure of it all and go back to their families and what they escaped from. To tackle this, Jas formed a support group with the help of many volunteers called the “Honor Network” which now counsels and helps such girls like a family or friends would.
I will now cite some bone chilling examples of what has happened to the girls (and boys too) she has quoted in the book, many a times the story is repetitive but that just reinforces the message and the horrid truth that this is such a widespread problem in UK.

Uzma – She was a Pakistani girl who got married to a UK boy of Pakistani origin. She took to the Western ways immediately like cutting her hair, wearing western dresses, being well groomed, getting a job. Soon a rumor went out that she was having an affair. Her husband threw her out of the house with her three kids. After a while, they were reunited by the family, but one fine day, her husband got into a fit of rage and killed her with 32 blows of a baseball bat. He then called her three children one by one and beat them to death with the same bat.

Fozia – Another Pakistani girl who ran away from home when she found out she was going to be married. A year before, her three sisters were taken to Pakistan and married off. One of the sisters, Raveeda was protesting to her father that she did not want to marry. Her father who was usually a mild man, pinned her to the wall and held a knife to her throat and said if she didn’t marry he would kill her. The youngest sister who was only 16 protested to her father that her husband had raped her, to which her father said, “This is not rape, it is a husband’s right”.

Heshu Yones – She was a 16 year old Kurdish Muslim. Her father stabbed her 17 times – reason, she had a Christian boyfriend. Her father used to beat her several times every day. She told this to her teachers many times but they ignored it. Her father was sentenced to only 8 years prison since the judge thought he “understood” the pain of the father and his frame of mind. The father was given a hero’s welcome in his community when he came back after jail was over.

Shazia – She is Jas’s right hand person. She ran away from home after being to forced to marry a Pakistani boy who got citizenship because of her and the moment he got it, he started mistreating her. Shazia remembers her friend Shahin who was killed by her father along with her mother, her sister and himself. That day, she and her friend were sitting on a swing in the park since it was a day off school due to teachers’ training. Her father found her there, got very angry and dragged her by her from the swing and did the killings there.

Shabana – She had an affair with a white boy John Henderson. When she revealed this at home, there was shock, dismay at home, her father kept beating her and kicked her in the ribs. Her mother stared blankly at the wall and kept screaming “Oh the Shame! The Shame”. After being beaten up every day with such scenes, she ran away.

Imran – This is not limited to girls. Imran a Pakistani boy who had a very dominating mother was also forced into a marriage with a Pakistani girl. At the age of 14, he had become very rebellious and got into a lot of trouble. His mother sent her to Pakistan to her brother in law’s place to “discipline” him. They took him to a remote village and placed him in custody of a maulvi who taught him the holy book every day. The cruelty was that they tied chains around his ankles with a heavy metal ball which bit into his skin when he tried to walk. He somehow ran away from there after a few days and reached England. Then one day he got the “call” from home that his mother was seriously ill and of course, he had to get married. He finally walked out of the marriage after a few years and now works for Karma Nirvana as a volunteer.

And the stories go on. I was glad that there were not many Indian names in this book apart from a couple of Sikh girls which goes to show that we may have evolved slightly more than our neighbors. Right opposite to my apartment is a house where a Bangladeshi family lives. The mother wears a head scarf and the younger girls don’t, the older girl wears it. The boys are of course, free to do what they like. When we look at them, we now remember characters from this book, I am sure they are going to end up in the same place.

ANALYSIS:
The first thing I’d like to say here is that when people move away from their homeland and culture, they tend to carry a frozen picture of their origin with them. The mother country and its culture moves on but these people still tend to stick to their old ways. I have seen this in many places. Another reason this happens is because a minority feels insecure about their young ones being swept away by the host country’s ways and tend to hold on tightly to their ways to stem the “pollution”. That is how ghettoes are created. Even now, the first question that people ask a person who has reached onsite is “Are there Indians around?”.
The second point that I’d like to make which is slightly controversial but I have been believing and saying this for a long time – the so called “Culture” of ours which we always tom-tom is completely resting on the sacrifice of women. If we say our family system is great, it is because the women hold it together by suffering in silence – eating after everyone has eaten is a prime example, spending least on themselves, leaving their jobs to look after kids etc. This has changed in our generation with a lot more women working and having financial independence but it is still the woman that makes the sacrifice and that is how the family and the “culture” survives (as managers, we have seen many girls asking us for a specific town or country at onsite because her husband is there, how many boys have asked for a specific onsite location because his wife is there, not many). If we are so proud of having less divorces in our country (and this is changing now), it is because women did not have too many options of support (families simply advised them to stay in the husband’s place and adjust to the “abuse”) outside. In the Western world, this was a common scenario in the 40s and 50s, it was after that the women started working in equal measure and government stepped in with lot of help for the single woman – essentially the state has taken the place of the family. Hence, divorces are common and so are re-marriages. Quite often, a couple has “your kid”, “my kid” and “our kid”, but there is a very sound reason behind this as mentioned above. With greater financial independence and even dominance, our “culture” is going to go this way as well though not as sharply. I am not supporting divorce or condoning a family-less society, merely mentioning the facts.