No Love Without Honour

Photograph: PA

"She was being squeezed between two cultures - the culture and way of life that she saw around her and wanted to embrace, and the culture and way of life you wanted to impose on her.  Your concern about being shamed in your community was greater than the love of your child."  Judge Roderick Evans

There is more happening in London, England than the Olympics.  A trial was just concluded, that found Iftikhar Ahmed and Farzana Ahmed guilty of murdering their daughter, 17-year-old Shafilea Ahmed in 2003.  It took nine years to bring this father and mother to justice, to pass sentence of life imprisonment for failing their daughter's trust.  But they could counter that their trust in her was dishonoured by her.

And that, as a result, by the measurement and yardstick of their cultural tradition, she had forfeited her right to live.  She was theirs, after all, their child, and it was they who ordered their children's lives, not they.  Living in Britain, such unspeakable, mindless brutality is not the norm, not part of the social contract, and there are laws that are meant to prevent such tragedies.  But alert as authorities are, the reality is they will occur.

Shafilea as a young teen hid make-up and western clothing, changing into them at school, and then into garb her parents approved of after school.  She informed school officials of what her home experience was like, of regular beatings at the hands of her loving parents.  She was particularly alarmed that she knew they planned to force her to marry.  "One parent would hold me whilst the other hit me", she informed them.

The school informed social services.  On a number of occasions.  But her file with them was closed in 2002.  The following year her parents medicated her and brought her to Pakistan to finalize the arranged marriage to a cousin.  Shafilea managed to drink bleach as a suicidal cry for help, injuring herself.  That proved to be useful in having the marriage called off.

Back in Britain, her parents continued to be enraged by her conduct.  After one argument over her wearing of a T-shirt, her parents stuffed a white plastic bag into her mouth, immobilized her on a sofa, and kept their hands over her mouth and nose until she stopped breathing.  Shafilea had three younger sisters.  Their ages ranged from seven, to twelve and fifteen.  They were witnesses to their sister's killing.

Iftikhar Ahmed loaded his daughter's blanket-wrapped body into the family car, and dumped it in the River Kent where it was found, badly decomposed, in 2004.  They had reported her missing.  They had been questioned by police suspicious of them, despite their tearful appeals for information leading to their daughter's whereabouts.  The loving parents accused the police of racial profiling.

In 2010, Shafilea's sister Alesha, then 21, informed police detectives what she had witnessed.  Her younger two sisters denied that anything amiss had occurred.  The girls feared that they were next on their parents' agenda.  Alesha explained: "I was living between two cultures and trying to please everyone.  It was when I went to university that I saw how wrong our family life was.  When you get used to something, it becomes normal."

A diary with an entry written at the time by the twelve-year-old sister was tabled as evidence: "I wish I'd never seen it, but I did.  If people knew what I was writing now, that's it, I'd be gone.  I'm thinking, 'Is it me next?'"  That sister denied the entry was anything other than an exercise in "free writing".

One saving grace: Mohammed Shafiq of the Manchester-based Ramadhan Foundation had this to say: "The strong message goes out and should be very clear:  if you engage in honour killings - if you engage in forced marriages - you will be caught and brought to justice."

Is that message capable of turning controlling, culturally-indoctrinated parents away from practising the horrors of capital punishment on children whom they should be protecting and holding more dear than the imagined shame of facing their cultural peers with the news that they failed in controlling their children's emotions and intentions?