Banaz Mahmod
‘Honour killing’
The title alone, No Safe Place : Murdered by our father, instantly captures something of the terror of being born into a family where violence is the norm. But this is no work of fiction; it’s a true story – a story so horrific that the identities of the two girls at its centre have had to be concealed. It is told by Bekhal Mahmod assisted by a legal reformer, Dr Hannanah Siddiqui.
Bekhal Mahmod was one of six siblings born into a Sunni Muslim family in Iraqi Kurdistan. Though living conditions were primitive, her early years were happy in the bosom of her extended family. But suddenly, when she was just six years old, the father she had adored and respected began to subject her to beatings and abuse as he enforced his strict misogynistic rules. Six years old.
At the age of about eight, she was genitally mutilated by her elderly, half-blind grandmother, pinned down by her own mother and aunt, with no explanation, no compassion. The shaking hand managed to sever a nerve with the open razor and cause serious haemorrhaging, but the women promptly threw scalding vegetable oil over the area to cauterize it, using nothing more than beetroot to treat the child’s raging fever. She waited a further six years for an explanation as to why this had been done to her.
Some girls die from blood loss or severe infections …
But hey, never mind – because it’s all about ‘honour’, right? Such is the mentality of some of the men in our family.
From that time on Bekhal knew she wanted to flee from this culture, this religion, the oppression, violence and control.
As she grew, and as she challenged the status quo, so the violence escalated. The soles of her feet were burned with a red hot metal scraper. Her bottom was thrashed with a hosepipe whip. Extreme verbal abuse left her feeling worthless and unloved. She was partially suffocated by her father sitting on her face. She witnessed a teenage neighbour being killed in a vat full of steaming tar. Another girl who lived nearby was killed by her father scalding her from head to toe in boiling water.
‘That’s what happens when they don’t listen to their fathers,’ her mother warned her.
Yet another father locked his daughter alone in the house and bombed it with hand grenades.
Still there was no mention of the term ‘honour killing‘ in Bekhal’s hearing. But the fathers were known as heroes in their community.
The perpetrators are proud. In their warped minds they’ve ended the shame and reinstated their family’s honour. It gives them power.
It was not until she was ten that Bekhal was able to go to school … a strict religious all-girls school, and this became a blessed form of escapism, and a place where she experienced approval and affection.
Then, suddenly and secretly, the family all moved to London.The culture shock was massive. But the tragedies of life in Iran reached across the miles when they learned that Bekhal’s beloved and beautiful cousin, Avin, was so desperately unhappy that she had committed suicide. And though the abuse, sadness and inhumane violence continued, Bekhal’s rebellion also escalated as she experimented with clothes, make-up, tobacco, weed, alcohol … if she was going to be abused anyway she might as well earn the beatings! But not even her miscellaneous efforts to numb the pain could prevent depression and self-harm claiming this teenage girl, drawing her inexorably towards a suicide attempt.
I can’t even try to kill myself without getting a beating.
Her father and uncle stepped up the vigilance and she was overtly threatened with death if she persisted in flouting the strict rules of their culture.
If I had my way, you’d be turning into ashes by now.
Their solution? To force her into an arranged marriage with a much older cousin in Iraq – at just fifteen years of age. Terrified, she ran away, making herself a target for ‘honour killing’. She was trapped.
If I run away, I’m dead; if I go home, I’m dead.
To Bakhal’s horror, in an effort to restore his family’s collective reputation, her father swiftly married off his two younger daughters, Banaz and Payzee, by force, to much older men. But two years later, aged only nineteen, Banaz walked out on her husband saying he had beaten and raped her; and she wanted to marry someone else, a young man from a different tribe who was not a strict Muslim, and therefore deemed ‘unsuitable’. More ‘shame’ on the family. She too must now die.
In 2006 when Banaz was twenty, she vanished. Though she had reported the violence and the threats to the police on five occasions, the system failed her, and she was brutally raped, tortured and murdered in a so-called ‘honour killing’, her body stuffed in a suitcase and buried in the garden of a disused house far from the scene of the crime. Bekhal was devastated.
Seven male relatives were convicted, her father and uncle among them, though the police stated that there were up to fifty men from their community involved in the murder or the cover-up. Bekhal’s own evidence was crucial in securing the convictions and for her own safety she was put into witness protection with a new identity. Even so she has spent, and will spend, the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, conscious that the unrepentant men who killed her sister and continued to boast of their ‘honourable’ actions in prison, have her high on their hit list still.
This landmark case in the Old Bailey shone a spotlight on the horrors being perpetrated in the name of honour, generating a powerful movement to end such brutality in this country. It also exposed multiple failings on the part of the police to protect Banaz from repeated attempts on her life and a catalogue of abuse, with both these authors working tirelessly to introduce new legislation to protect vulnerable women and girls: to be known as ‘Banaz’s Law‘. Films have been made, interviews recorded, courses run, based on this remarkable and tragic story. This book is but one cog in the wheels of change. A sobering and harrowing read.