The murder of the teenager Shafilea Ahmed is likely to stand out in British history as a particularly gruesome example of what we now refer to as “honour killings”. Shafilea had warned that her parents were trying to marry her off to Pakistan; others knew she had sustained injuries from beatings by her parents; she had even tried to commit suicide in Pakistan. But right until the end, her own life was fated to be out of her control – she went missing in 2003 and her dismembered body was found a year later.
Shafilea’s case wasn’t a one-off. It took eight years for the murderers of the Sikh woman Surjit Athwal – her own husband and mother-in-law – to be brought to justice in 2007. It took ten years for Mehmet Goren to be jailed, in 2009, for murdering his daughter Tulay, because she fell in love with an older man of a different Muslim sect. Last year Gurmeet Singh Ubhi was found guilty of murdering his 24 year old daughter Amrit because the Sikh girl was dating a white man. There are others too – Heshu Yones, Banaz Mahmod, Nuziat Khan – the list of women murdered in the UK over their “honour” is depressingly long.
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