A Britain without honour or shame
At a Civitas lunchtime seminar today Nazir Afzal, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service for West London, spoke forcefully about the appalling persecution of Muslim women in Britain through forced marriages and honour-based violence. Such violence is based on a cultural assumption that women are of low worth and their lives must be controlled, and that if they break free of that control they may bring shame upon the family honour for which they are punished by violence and murder. He said:
The greatest fear of Muslim women [in Britain] is not of Islamophobia or being arrested by the police — it is of being attacked in their own homes.The meeting heard an impassioned intervention by a Muslim woman, Gina Khan, who was born and bred in Birmingham. Delighted as she was, she said, that this issue was finally being brought out into the open, it was twenty or thirty years too late.
I grew up listening to these shocking stories. There were women students twenty, thirty years ago who just disappeared [to the Indian subcontinent to be married against their will]. All this time Muslim women have been treated as if they don’t exist. We were given an interpretation of the Koran by people we didn’t question, and because we didn’t speak Arabic we just accepted it. Now we British-born Muslim women have to break our silence about all this.What makes this situation doubly dreadful, however, is the persecution of those who speak the truth about it. Afzal himself, whose family came from Peshawar, is subjected to repeated death threats and other pressure to stop him from drawing attention to the plight of Muslim women. After fruitlessly trying to get the issue raised at the Muslim Safety Forum, the (highly compromised) body that advises the police on Muslim matters, Afzal was horrified when a senior police officer who vouchsafed the correct information that the actual number of honour attacks in Britain was some thirty times the official figure subsequently felt obliged to apologise for saying so.
But there’s worse still. In Bradford, the person who has probably done more than anyone else in the country to protect Muslim women from honour violence and forced marriage is being hounded for doing so. Philip Balmforth, a former police inspector, is the 'vulnerable persons officer' responsible for Asian women in the Bradford district — a post partly funded by Bradford social services. According to Ann Cryer, the Labour MP for Keighley who was at the Civitas meeting, through his singular skills he has prevented thousands of Muslim women from enduring forced marriages or honour violence. He is, in short, a community hero — or should be. But instead he has been suspended from his post and, said Ms Cryer, was today expected to be sacked.
His ostensible offence? It seems it was to have been reported in the press as saying that the true extent of the problem was not being grasped. This comment reported in the Times apparently sealed his fate:
Referring to the 33 girls missing in his area, he said: ‘If these girls are missing, who has been told? Who is doing anything about it? I want to know from every education authority, “How many children did you lose last year? And where are they?” At the moment, we just don’t know. It’s like knocking a nail into a piece of stone.’As the Times subsequently reported, for such remarks — which were clearly in the public interest — Balmforth was suspended and faced the prospect of dismissal:
The former police inspector, regarded as a national authority on ‘honour-based’ violence, stands accused of ‘damaging the reputation’ of West Yorkshire Police by speaking to a newspaper without consent. It is understood that the force, which has investigated 176 cases of forced marriage in the past year alone, took action against Mr Balmforth after receiving a complaint from Bradford council. Senior figures on the local authority are said to have claimed that his high-profile work was damaging the city’s image and was ‘bad for regeneration’.Ms Cryer, however, electrified today’s meeting by claiming that Philip Balmforth was the victim of the ‘biraderie’ — the Punjabi word for the extended family — which now ran Bradford city council. The Muslim councillors wanted Balmforth out, she said — and their non-Muslim colleagues on the council, with an eye to their Muslim voters (and doubtless also embarrassed by the national high profile this problem has now achieved), were going along with the witch-hunt.
If this is so, and if Philip Balmforth is indeed sacked for seeking to protect British Muslim women from harm — thus enraging those who would harm them and embarrassing those who should have done more to help him protect them — it will be another grim watershed in this country’s spineless surrender to the forces of darkness.