Another perspective on the issue:
Our British laws are there to protect Muslim women | Mary Ann Sieghart - Times Online
Our British laws are there to protect Muslim women
Mary Ann Sieghart
Gina Khan knows the horrors of polygamy. Her mother was married off at 15 and only when her father took his new bride to the other side of Pakistan did Gina’s mother discover that he already had another wife and five children. Later he married a third woman, but when Gina’s parents came to Britain, her mother made him divorce the third wife: “She knew that there was a law in this country that protected her. He never did it again.”
Gina’s mother was traumatised, though, and would burst into tears at the recollection. But the family brush with polygamy doesn’t stop there. Gina’s sister suffered the same fate and ended up being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. And Gina, when happily married to a Pakistani man, had to endure him being forced by his family to take a second wife: his 16-year-old cousin. With reluctance, she divorced him.
I interviewed Gina for The Times a year ago, and she was determined to highlight the plight of Muslim women living in an utterly male-dominated community. She has had to endure persecution, including a brick through her window and threatening phone calls. But she won’t give up. “We are in the 21st century; we’re not in the 7th century.” Yet, even though polygamy is illegal here, the Government still pays extra benefits to men with more than one wife, as long as the marriage was conducted in a country where polygamy is allowed. When John Hutton was Work and Pensions Secretary, he demanded a review: the conclusion, last December, was that it should remain.
Why, when ministers claim to be trying to empower Muslim women, do they support a barbaric tradition that is against women’s interests and against the law? The DWP tries to play down the number of people able to claim such benefits, but its guidance still talks about “valid polygamous marriages”. How can a polygamous marriage be valid in any circumstances here? This is just one example of Muslim women being denied the same rights as other women, in the name of respecting different faiths. The exaggerated attempt to embrace “diversity”, exemplified by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is disastrous not just for social cohesion, but for many members of the Muslim community too, most of them female.
It is one thing to respect Muslims’ need for halal butchery or for Sharia-compliant mortgages: these are genuine religious differences that harm nobody. But polygamy, forced marriages and (dis)honour violence are practices more cultural than religious. They are rooted in the culture of South Asian communities, often deeply rural, and have no place in modern Britain. They do not deserve respect or even toleration.
Yet still there are schools that refuse to put up posters giving warning of the dangers of forced marriages, according to a recent report by the Centre for Social Cohesion. Shazia Qayum, team leader at Karma Nirvana, a refuge in Derby, claims: “We approached schools to get posters up that let children know that there was help available. This was just before the holidays, which is the most critical time, because this is when girls get taken off to Pakistan or Bangladesh to be married. Unfortunately, none of the schools would let us put them up because they said it would offend the parents.”
And still there is often collusion within the Asian community to prevent women running away from forced marriages. Taxi drivers taking battered women to refuges will sometimes report their whereabouts to their abusive husbands. John Paton, manager of the Lancashire Family Mediation Service, says: “It’s extremely difficult for an Asian woman to go to a community worker or an agency where she knows that there are potentially people there who will report back to her family what she has said.”
There have even been complaints about local councillors intimidating Asian women’s groups. As the chair of a women’s project, who wants to remain anonymous for her own safety, explains: “We have a lot of pressure from the local councillors in Bradford; they are the bad ones, because they abuse their power by trying to get details on who is staying with us and what they are doing. They give us a hard time, until we have to complain to the police and they back off. They are dominant males who are trying to bully us.” Unfortunately, Britain’s Asian community is full of dominant males, and unless we work actively to resist them, Asian women will continue to be bullied. Giving them the “choice” of using Sharia, when such a choice is likely to be forced on them by their husbands, fathers or brothers, is no help at all.
You don’t just have to be concerned about women’s safety to be alarmed. According to Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s lead on such matters: “If you had a map of the UK showing the location of Islamist groups – or terrorist cells – and you had another map showing the incidence of honour-based violence and you overlaid them, you would find that they were a mirror; they would be almost identical. It could be that this is simply because this is where South Asians live or it could suggest there is a strong link between these two attitudes.” So we should all be concerned that life in Britain can be miserable for South Asian women. They are at least three times more likely to kill themselves than white women of the same age. We should not be encouraging them to use Sharia courts run exclusively by men, even for civil matters. Nor should we be worried about offending cultural sensitivities by standing up for their rights. We should be telling their menfolk that the traditions of rural Pakistan, Bangladesh and India are unacceptable enough over there. They are completely intolerable in this free country.
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She rightly states that the bad things are not religious, which is something rare from a British writer.