Life for Honour?

by Katrin Vaga

“Is a life not worth more than someone's distorted understanding of honour?” asks women' s right campaigner Diana Nammi.

The number of honour crimes in the UK has doubled over the last year, but according to Diana Nammi these figures show only the tip of the iceberg.

Nammi is the director of Iranian and Kurdish Women´s Right Organisation (IKWRO). She founded it seven years ago to help Muslim women seek a way out of home violence.

Changing perceptions

The non-profit charity has been working hard to inform not only the public, but also police officers about the type of crimes against women typical of some extreme Muslim communities.

During the last six months police in the UK have reported 211 incidents of honour-related crime, 129 of them were criminal offences — twice the number of a year ago.

What do people think of honour crime? Watch the video:

According to Nammi, awareness about honour crime among the police was extremely low when she started building up the charity. For that reason most cases of honour killings were never properly investigated and sent to trial.

"When we started working here I asked the police, why were they always looking for the murderer from outside the family?” she recalls. "They said it seemed racist to interfere in family and cultural business. That it was easier to leave us alone. Many of these women were UK citizens, but never received the justice they deserved."

Personal experience

Nammi set up the IKWRO, the only such organization in UK, because of her own experiences. “I had a colleague who was living in London with her husband. She didn’t come to work one day”, she explains.

Nammi was shocked to find out that her colleague had been killed by her brother and husband after being accused of flirting with one of her male colleagues.

"It’s unbelievable. They planned everything,” says the campaigner, "She was taken to Iraq to be killed and after her husband came back he just continued to live his life in the normal way he had done before."

This was nine years ago and Nammi called the police to ask if there was something they could do. "The officer laughed, and asked me why someone would kill their family member for flirting with a colleague”, she remembers.

Today, the police investigate about a dozen new honour killing cases a year. But this does not include other instances of honour crimes, including beatings, rapes, harassment, sexual mutilations and forced marriages.

Around 10% of the women who call up IKWRO for help are at a very high risk of being killed.

Witnesses keeping silent

"Honour crimes don’t come as a surprise,” claims Nammi she says that women are often too scared to talk to the police as it may result in putting their lives under further threat.

Nammi has a photo of a very young girl, "Heshu was one of our first cases,” she explains, “Everybody knew - her relatives, friends, even her teacher at school knew that her father had threatened to kill her, but none of them testified in court.”

Perhaps the most well known murder case was that of 15-year-old schoolgirl Tulay Goren’s. Her trial resulted in the conviction of her father Mehmet Goren last December.

The case reached the Old Bailey 10 years after Tulay went missing when her mother Hanim Goren finally agreed to testify against her husband.

Fundamentalism causes honour crime rise

Nammi is sure that the increase of honour crime cases in the UK is due to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

"30 years ago in Iran nothing like this was happening. My grandmother, who was very old, had only heard of a few cases of honour crimes during her life. She could count them in her one hand," says Nammi. "Now the situation is different in Iran and everywhere else.”

Listen to an interview about where the honour killing tradition comes from. 

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