Honour crimes to be discussed at collaborative event

The event, which is intended to raise awareness of honour based crime, will take place on Monday 10 July between 2.30 and 4.30pm at Leeds Beckett’s City Campus in Woodhouse Lecture Theatre 3 on Portland Way.

Rachael Aplin, Senior lecturer in Criminology, will host the forum alongside the CEO of the British human rights charity Karma Nirvana, Jasvinder Sanghera. Rachel will present some findings from her PhD thesis which specifically concentrates on the female perpetration of honour based abuse.

Explaining her findings, Rachael said: “Women contribute to abuse either through violence, psychological abuse, condoning the behaviours of men or luring victims through deceptive means.

“It is important that professionals take notice of the roles played by women in order to better safeguard victims of this crime, which includes children and vulnerable adults.”

The forum will conclude with a question and answer session. The forum will benefit victims, professionals and academics specialising in the field of honour based abuse.

To register to attend the event please visit http://bit.ly/2ridYDT. Refreshments will be provided.

In March, Rachael published research which suggested that mothers play a central role in honour-based crime yet this is often unrecognised by police and other agencies.

An analysis of 100 cases of honour-based crimes found that 76 % (76/100) involved women, with 49 cases involving mothers, yet in the majority of cases the mother’s role was not officially recorded by police in the crime report.

Honour crimes are acts which have been committed to protect or defend the supposed honour or reputation of a family and community. The victims are usually – though not always – women and girls. More than 11,700 honour crimes were recorded by UK police forces between 2010-2014. Unlike other types of domestic abuse, honour-based crime tends to involve multiple perpetrators acting together.

In the cases studied by Aplin, mothers were very often a key player within this group. Mothers were the most common type of female perpetrator, carrying out all types of abuse, including physical violence, threats, false imprisonment and intrusive surveillance. Mothers were also the only family members to inflict violence on pregnant daughters with the aim of inducing a miscarriage. They used their power within the home to control victims, often exploiting their daughters’ misplaced loyalty and belief that they would protect them.

Despite incident reports explicitly implicating the mother in violence, uniformed officers did not identify the mother on the police computer or in the formal crime report for 12 per cent of the cases analysed.

The abuse perpetrated by mothers included hitting, kicking and slapping, assault with household objects, cutting off the daughters’ hair, deception in order to encourage a fleeing victim back home, threatening to kill the victim or throw them down stairs, bartering to sell them, false imprisonment, emotional blackmail, confiscation of passports, bank cards and mobile phones and emotional blackmail.