UNTIL WE ARE HEARD ...

By Joanne Payton

2019 was my first FiLiA, I’m embarrassed to say. Despite spending several decades within the feminist fold, it took a speaking role to get me and on a succession of trains and coaches to chilly Bradford from the rainy depths of the Welsh Valleys. I was invited to be part of a panel on ‘honour’ by one of the most dynamic and inspiring feminist activists I know, Sadia Hameed. I jumped at the chance - not just because Sadia’s a good friend, or because I wanted to promote my recently published book on ‘honour’ crimes (available here, by the way…) but because I knew that it would be more welcoming than presenting my research within academic settings.

I would not be required to explain why I was researching such a divisive topic as ‘honour’ crimes nor be told that such crimes were surely a fiction, only of interest to fans of Tommy Robinson and his ilk. I would not have to apologise for my work or justify it. I was in a space where women and girls matter, and where violence against women is treated as a paramount social problem. I knew that the audience understood that there were complex and interlocking causes to male violence, and that these needed to be discussed openly and honestly.

I was also excited to be on the panel that took such an innovative approach to ‘honour’. Since the current policy approach to the category of abuse known as ‘harmful traditional practices’ encapsulates FGM, forced and child marriage, and ‘honour’ based violence, other manifestations of ‘honour’ culture tend to get side-lined. Vandana Aparanti’s discussion of caste-based discrimination impacts women, and Fatima Najm’s emotive footage of fathers’ attitudes to their daughter’s education indicated how ‘honour’ impacts on women’s and girls’ lives in ways that expanded way beyond the parameters of current policy-makers.

For my own presentation, I’d decided to fine down upon a particular aspect of ‘honour’ culture drawn from my PhD research. In 2010, journalist Tazeen Ahmad (who died a few weeks after the conference, at a tragically young age) produced an uncompromising documentary on the prevalence of genetic illnesses within the UK’s Pakistani communities. She candidly attributed these with consanguineous marriages within that community, particularly cousin marriage. In so doing, she exposed a social problem that impacted particularly on mothers, who were forced into lifetime of caring responsibilities for their disabled children. Similarly, I know from my own work that more than one young bride has been imported from Pakistan for an arranged marriage with the expectations of family life - only to find that she has been effectively recruited as a carer to a disabled man.

But the hundreds of young people in the UK with crippling disabilities, and the demands placed upon women due to these disabilities, are not the only concerning impact of the sociocultural expectation that cousins marry. My own research had showed an important correlation between cousin marriage and ‘honour’ crimes. I used my session to focus upon the way that using women to tie families together situated them as carriers of male identity – and how this made them vulnerable to patriarchal control and violence. Cousin marriages were used to control patterns of inheritance, to maintain and consolidate in-group solidarities and to maintain family ‘honour.’ Statistically, in my work, the existence of cousin marriage more than doubled the likelihood of ‘honour’ crimes within the family.  Anthropologists such as Germaine Tillion and Frederick Barth have noted these connections since the 1950s. In one of the most gut-wrenching examples, in 2007, Du’a Khalil Aswad was stoned to death by her uncles and cousins after she attempted to elope with a man of her own choice. They thought they had the right to decide what she did with her body and she did not. They thought her body belonged to them.

This panel on ‘honour’, diverse in its makeup and its insights and united in its feminist convictions, was a microcosm of the event as a whole. From beginning to end, the FiLiA featured panels and speakers that showed the richness, inclusiveness and energy of contemporary feminism, taking on the challenge of understanding the sex-based oppression of women, and exploring how that intersects with orientation, class, race, culture, politics, citizenship and history.

Feminist activism is difficult and dangerous work; women who express political opinions receive horrifying, obscene levels of abuse. But it’s essential that we are not silent, because women and girls make up 71% of human trafficking victims, where one in four are married as a child and pregnancy is the number one cause of death for teenaged girls worldwide, 63 million girls and women have undergone FGM, and a girl dies every five minutes due to violence. Often, what feminists have to say about the global epidemic of violence against women and girls is treated as unsayable. But it needs to be said, louder and louder, and over and over again, until we are heard.

Art by Ronak Aziz