Who is looking after these girls?
What is going on? Nobody is looking after them, not the police, not the schools, not the government. They have no protection. They have nowhere to go. They have no money. They have no voice. There is a VAST gap in provision for Asian women; the huge pressures the second generation are under, caught between two cultures, is not even beginning to be addressed. Beginning to see now that the burqa covers a multitude of sins. There are support groups but they're so clandestine as to be virtually invisible. (I know this because I was trying to find one, and it's much easier for me). If you are a 16 year old Pakistani or Bangladeshi girl, would you have the knowledge or skills or initiative to find a women's hostel to take you in? With no help, no information, no network, no backup... I hope this girl's death forces the powers that be to wake up.
About Courbet (yet again)
1 day ago
7 comments:
Hear, hear.
No one looks after them because it's still too much of a political hot potato. It's just not on to mess with that culture.
If things are bad over here, how do you think some daughters are being treated back home at the hands of unloving families where the female is nothing but a business commodity?
Absolutely. And very true what Istvanski says, too. I think there needs to be a huge sea change in the way the whole issue of integration is dealt with. And, more to the point, the Police need to find out who did it. Because the killer still hasn't been caught...
As for back home... agreed, it's heartbreaking. What can you do? We often see Westernisation as a corrupting immoral influence, but you can only hope that something positive comes across as well through the power of the Dollar and Sterling.
It must be so isolating and frightening for girls in this position. I saw a gut-wrenchingly shocking documentary two nights ago about honour killings. Really shocking. Pickled Politics did something on it a while ago:
http://www.pickledpolitics.com
/archives/1446
Quink, thanks. It's like we're back in the 70s, pre-Women's Refuges & Women's Aid, having to fight those battles all over again. It's a really shameful case of neglect - how many more girls are going to die before something is put into place to help them?
Istvanski - It's just not on to mess with that culture... This is the problem. But they are citizens here too.
Del, true - from the contact I've had, there is something medieval about the mindset. The problems come for the generation who've grown up here and have different ideas and influences...
RoMo, interesting. That article was about the Government raising the age of immigration to the UK to 24, supposedly to try and make forced marriages of Asian women to UK men more difficult to impose on younger, more powerless women. (Some of the writers seemed to think that it was an anti-immigration measure in disguise, dressed up as an attempt to help Asian women who were being coerced...)
We don't really know what happened in this case. The parents, who didn't report her missing at first, later complained that the police didn't co-operate with them, just sat on their hands for 4 years. That might be posturing, or it might be true.
That aside, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has written eloquently on the veil of silence [sorry, can't work out how to hotlink this]:
http://www.alibhai-brown.com/archive/article.php?id=68
Awful story, and what should we be doing about it?
I know, innocent til proven guilty and all that, but... she DRANK BLEACH to try and commit suicide, and asked her friends not to let her parents take her home from school...
I don't know what the answer is, but putting her into care would've been better than what happened...
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