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Posts Tagged ‘honour based violence’

Afghanistan`s daring, taboo-smashing feminist TV drama

Kabul: In a grimy Kabul street, the director gives the order to roll the cameras, and filming starts on a remarkable new TV drama that boldly challenges taboos about women in conservative Afghanistan.

Shereen, the star, enters the scene and buys a few things from street vendors when suddenly her husband, a possessive and brutal man, grabs her.

But tough, no-nonsense Shereen won`t back down and a row ensues.

“Shereen`s Law”, due to be aired on Afghan TV before the end of the year, tells the story of a 36-year-old woman who brings up three children on her own while forging a career as a clerk at a court in Kabul.

Such a character is already shocking in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society where most women are confined to lives of menial domesticity.

But the show deliberately ramps up the impact. Shereen fights corruption, harassment, and rape, and tries to divorce her husband, whom she wed in a forced marriage.

More than 13 years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains deeply wedded to traditional customs and its airwaves have never hosted anything like this before.

 

Read More: http://zeenews.india.com/news/south-asia/afghanistans-daring-taboo-smashing-feminist-tv-drama_1572331.html

Our Film About ‘Honor Violence’ Should Not Be Censored

Last Sunday, a group of students at the University of South Dakota planned to attend a screening of our film, Honor Diaries, a documentary focused on the abuses women face under the honor system.

The film follows the stories of nine women’s rights activists — of Christian, Sikh, and Muslim backgrounds — as they tackle the taboo surrounding honor-based violence: murders in the name of honor, forced and early marriage, and female genital mutilation (FGM).

The film has won awards at multiple film festivals, been screened at the UK House of Commons, Amnesty International, and the UN in New York and Geneva, as well as hundreds of universities across the countries. But the students in South Dakota never got a chance to watch the film. They were not given the platform to explore its issues, celebrate its women, or become empowered by its message. A professor at the university who supports the film called it “stealth repression” that the film screening was mysteriously canceled. Organizers of another Honor Diaries screening, scheduled for April 10 at the university, have been under steady attack and pressure to do the same. Fortunately, they are holding out and standing strong in the name of freedom of expression, human rights and women’s empowerment.

Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/raheel-raza/honor-diaries_b_6968630.html

Women call for laws to fight forced marriage in U.S.

Mariam was a sixth-grader in Toronto when her family started pressuring her to get engaged. They sent her on a summer trip to their native Pakistan, ostensibly to study but actually to meet a fiance chosen by her aunt. When she protested after returning home, she said, her mother kept insisting and wearing her down.

“She cried a lot. She prayed loudly to God that I would change. She refused to speak to me for days. She told me the family’s honor was at stake,” recounted Mariam, now 20, who asked that her last name not be published. “I wanted to finish school and go to college, but at times I almost said yes, just so she would stop crying.”

Finally, when she turned 17, Mariam decided to leave home — an unthinkable act in her culture. With encouragement from a women’s rights group, she slipped out early one morning, taking a small bag. No shelter would accept her, because she had not been physically abused, and she felt wracked with guilt and loneliness. Eventually, though, she found housing, friends and a measure of emotional independence.

Today, Mariam is active in a growing movement in the United States and Canada to promote public awareness and legal protections for victims of forced marriage. She visited Washington last week as part of a nationwide tour organized by the Tahirih Justice Center, a legal aid and advocacy group in the Virginia suburbs that helps immigrant women facing abuse.

Read More: http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20150323/news/150329655/

Law firm Makin Dixon says child sex abuse grooming ‘massive issue’ for Huddersfield

Child sexual abuse grooming is a ‘massive issue’ for Huddersfield, a law firm has said.

West Yorkshire law firm Makin Dixon, which has offices on Queen Street, says it has been dealing with a marked increase in cases of girls being groomed for sex by older men.

The company has been working to obtain injunctions to prevent perpetrators contacting their victims, some of whom have children to their abusers. Makin Dixon partner, Jane Campbell, says victims and their relatives have become more willing to report abuse, which also includes ‘honour’ violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation. But much of it still passes ‘under the radar’.

Ms Campbell, who works at Queen Street, says the company deals with hundreds of cases of ‘honour’ violence each year, together with about 100 cases of forced marriageacross West Yorkshire.

Read More: http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/child-sex-abuse-grooming-massive-8906647

I help women get out of arranged marriages

One day in March 2011, Fraidy Reiss went to her lawyer’s office to close on a house. The prosaic routine of paperwork somehow diminished her sense of accomplishment. Not even the seller was present to hear what she yearned to say.

She was only buying a small patch of lawn in a blue-collar neighbourhood. Yet she and her two daughters had already named the place “Palais de Triomphe,” palace of triumph. The house symbolized her liberation from an arranged marriage, threats of violence at the hands of her estranged husband, and indeed the entire insular community of stringently Orthodox Jews among whom she had spent her entire life.

In that moment of emancipation, Reiss also felt the sudden, unbidden summons of obligation.

“The house meant that I’ve gotten to the other side,” she recalled. “I wanted to do something to give back. I wanted to use my pain to help others in the same situation. And, selfishly, I thought that would help me heal.” Four years later, on a blustery morning early this month, Reiss, 40, stood in a classroom at Rutgers University in Newark telling her story to three dozen lawyers. She spoke with well-practiced pacing and emphasis – childhood in Brooklyn, coerced betrothal in her teens to a man she barely knew, and then the harassment and stalking and death threats, all of it documented in court papers. Finally, there was college and therapy and, after 15 years of marriage, divorce.

Read More: http://www.dailylife.com.au/life-and-love/real-life/i-help-women-get-out-of-arranged-marriages-20150321-1m4lu1.html

Halo Project Durham Launch

Halo Project Durham Launch

The Halo Project Staff with Ron Hogg, PCC for Durham and Chaz Akoshile, Joint Head of The Forced Marriage Unit launching Halo’s new poster campaign to raise awareness for Honour Based Violence & Forced Marriage.

How do we keep girls safe?

I am hurrying through a maze of streets in a city in Pakistan with two officials from the British High Commission in Islamabad. It’s a race against time to rescue a British girl who fears she is being forced into marriage against her will. Sana, a 19-year-old from the Midlands, was brought here by her parents, lured with the promise that she could go to university. Instead, she was physically abused when she refused to marry a man she had never met.

Sana cannot leave the house and is afraid to speak on her mobile, but she can text. Smartphone technology enables British Consul Simon Minshull and his local colleague Neelam Farooq to pinpoint the house. Taken unawares, Sana’s parents let the officials in, and Farooq immediately insists on seeing her alone, telling her father they are concerned for her welfare. Once alone, Sana tells Farooq she is desperate to leave. “She has asked for assistance and we cannot refuse that,” Farooq firmly tells her father.

Now Minshull demands the girl’s British passport. While her father stalls, Farooq hustles Sana out. The family have made a phone call and more relatives are on their way. Things could turn nasty. Within minutes, Sana is in our armoured convoy and we are speeding away. A slight figure with a quiet but determined manner, she confides that she was terrified the officials would not come, or that her father would not let her go.

“The abuse was very bad,” she says, admitting she had considered suicide rather than go through a forced marriage: “I thought the easiest way out was death, hard as that is… either that or get the embassy to help.”

The dramatic rescue in Pakistan was the culmination of work by a special government team – the Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) in the Foreign Office. It deals with around 1,400 cases a year but believes there may be more than 6,000. The unit has cases in 74 countries, but 42 per cent involve Pakistan, due to the large diaspora community in the UK. Last summer, forced marriage was made a criminal offence in Britain – a signal from the Government that the practice, which can lead to abuse, rape and murder, will no longer be tolerated. “Forced marriage is a government priority,” says Minshull, “and our commitment is that we will use the option of rescuing someone where we need to.”

Read More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/11368822/How-do-we-keep-girls-safe.html

Halo tackles forced marriage

VICTIMS of forced marriage and so-called honour-based violence are to get extra support, under a new project launched today (Friday, January 23).

The Halo project is being funded in County Durham and Darlington by Police and Crime Commissioner Ron Hogg and was launched at The Durham Centre, on Belmont Industrial Estate, Durham.

It is aimed at ensuring victims of forced marriage and honour-based violence get the support and advice they need.

Among those attending the launch with Mr Hogg were the North East Chief Crown Prosecutor Gerry Wareham, Halo’s Yasmine Khan and victims of such crimes.

The event included the unveiling of a student Halo campaign, aimed at raising awareness of such issues among young people.

Source: http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/local/northdurham/durham/11746889.Halo_tackles_forced_marriage/

Leo Burnett Designed This Shocking Cover of Cosmopolitan to Protest ‘Honor Killings’

In 2004, a 17-year-old British-Pakistani woman named Shafilea Ahmed was suffocated and murdered by her parents, in front of her siblings, after she refused an arranged marriage.

Her death is referenced clearly and heartbreakingly on limited-edition covers of the February issue of Cosmopolitan magazine in the U.K. to raise awareness about so-called honor killings—in which a person is murdered by a family member for bringing what the killer believes is shame upon the family.

Leo Burnett Change, Leo Burnett’s specialist arm dedicated to social change, designed the cover, which features a plastic wraparound encasing an image of a woman appearing to be suffocated. It’s part of a campaign for Karma Nirvana, the U.K. charity that helps victims of honor-based violence.

Read More: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/leo-burnett-designed-shocking-cover-cosmopolitan-protest-honor-killings-162355

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