Love laughs at locksmiths...

[ajva]

...oh - unless the locksmiths happen to be antediluvian fucking barbarians unworthy to be alive in the 21st Century, of course.

Can't we do more about this? Please?

Can't we find a way to be more interventionist that won't also be counter-productive? How can this keep happening in our country? Time and time again we hear if it. I'm sick of it.

Comments

[adjectivegail]

I know.

This does not offer any answers, but I thought you might find it interesting.

[alan1957.livejournal.com]

This case seems, to me at least, to be even worse than some of the others as the victim informed the police of her fears four times previously. Including the night before; this was hardly a 'hidden' crime!

It's hard to know what to say. Given that victims of hate crime (and I refuse to use a word like 'honour' in this context) are always being encouraged to come forward to the police, and then nothing happens. Will this case encourage witnesses, victims or potential victims of similar crimes to come forward...I doubt it, and that angers me further.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it? Again and again and again eh?

What do you suggest?

This is, essentially, a massive culture clash. No government has the guts to deal with it in anything beyond clearing up individual cases after they've gone wrong.

Because, I suspect, IMO that to do so would, they think (perhaps rightly) risk inflaming race relations to the point of utter chaos, almost civil war.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Women's rights always seem to come a poor second to just about every other political issue any time they go head-to-head. It angers me more than I can express.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

I'd say more, but this is a public post!!!

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

This was a massive faliure of the police, I think. More police awareness needed, and hopefully that will come from this case.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

But it's happened so many times before. We need to find a way of prosecuting first instances of personal violence severely without stopping people coming forward. A tall order, but not an impossible one, I wouldn't have thought, were the political will in place.

At the moment millions of people up and down the country will be saying to themselves: "what a horrible tragedy! But ah well, that's these Kurds for you..."

As James points out, there still remains a fear among the police of treading on ethnic minority toes, and that's not really down to the police: they're only doing the best that they can in a difficult climate. OK, so a bad misjudgement was made in this case, but that was within the wider context of the system not really giving much of a toss (an officer is the article in the Guardian today was quoted as saying that the systems that were supposed to have been put in place had been quietly shelved). We have to give the police special encouragement and dispensation to intervene in these cases, and not castigate them/countenance accusations of racism against them if it turns out they've acted on false allegations (false positives being so much more desirable here than false negatives).

[jhg.livejournal.com]

I should point out, of course - echoing one of the correspondents on the page which asrana links to - that I in no way suggest that abuse is peculiar to Kurds, Muslims, or any other particular cultural or racial groups.

But abuse in such quarters, within the UK, is especially hard to deal with due to a whole load of issues too numerous and obvious to list right now.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

No, abuse in general is obviously not peculiar to one cultural or racial group.

However, this particular *kind* of abuse is peculiar to particularly misogynistic cultures and we should not be afraid to say so.

The CPS website says:

Delegates heard that most honour crimes in the UK involve South Asian families but cases have also featured Middle Eastern, West African, Turkish, Bosnian, Kosovan and Roma families.

OK, so sexism is endemic in most, if not all, human cultures. However, as a freeborn white Scottish woman, I am totally free to be as goddamn adulterous as I please, and not risk death. This is liberty. There is a huge bloody elephant in the room here.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

Yay! I want a pet elephant!

By the way, what is the locksmith reference?

[ajva.livejournal.com]

It's not a reference to anything in particular; it's just an old adage in the Omnia vincit Amor line.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

Righto.

Do I go to hell for thinking, just for a second 'Gene Hunt would sort the buggers out'?

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more - all domestic violence should be dealt with equally firmly, and more so than it is now, regardless of ethnicity. I think it's especially hard in some very religious communities to leave without losing your whole family and friends. It's so unfair generally with domestic violence that the man gets to keep his nice house and social network while the woman has to live in a shelter and build her life back up alone.

>:(

Still, if the police force wasn't so inherently racist still, they'd have a greater number of officers from ethnic minority backgrounds working in areas with communities of those minorities, and I'm sure that would help.