BY ANNA BATTISTA

 

The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the annual worldwide total of honour killings might be as high as 5,000 women. The fear and isolation the victims of the “culture of honour” live in is often unbearable for the majority. Ferzanna Riley was brave enough to tell in a book the story of her ordeal and to inspire other people to speak up.

In recent years, honour killings have been reported in many countries throughout the world, from Pakistan to Iraq, from the UK to Italy. They will typically occur within Asian and Middle Eastern families when a person is believed to have brought shame upon their family. Each year hundreds of women are raped or killed in so-called honour attacks for behaviour including extramarital affairs, divorce, marriage without a family’s consent, refusal to enter an arranged marriage or choosing a career or wearing clothes the family disapprove of. Honour killings are usually committed by male family members against a female relative, but there have been cases in which mothers and sisters played a part in helping with the punishment. Many cases go unreported, almost all go unpunished: it’s impossible to know on a global level how widespread honour killings are as sometimes they are covered up by other family members.

In August 2006, Italy witnessed the first “honour killing” in the modern history of the country: a young woman of Pakistani origin, Hina Saleem, 20, was killed by a council of male family members, her father, her uncle and two cousins. Her throat was slit and her body buried in the garden. After being arrested, her father admitted to the murder explaining that his daughter had become too Western in her dress and manners. Hina had indeed warmed to the Italian lifestyle: she worked as a waitress, wore Western clothes, had recently moved in with her Italian boyfriend and refused to change her ways and return to Pakistan for an arranged marriage. “It’s not about honour,” writer and journalist Ferzanna Riley tells me when I mention her Hina’s story, “it’s about dishonour and it’s going to be a long process to stop people believing that killing someone to your own honour is acceptable. The first step is for the people who like myself are suffering or have suffered in the name of honour, to step forward and recognise it as abuse and as a criminal act.” Ferzanna has taken the first step by writing her harrowing memoir Unbroken Spirit (Hodder & Stoughton, 2007). Born in Pakistan, when she was three years old Ferzanna moved with her mother and older sister to Preston, Lancashire, where her father had emigrated in the ‘60s and where he had been working in a cotton mill. The period of separation between father and daughter estranged the two and, gradually, their relationship deteriorated.

After the birth of four other children, Ferzanna became the scapegoat in many family quarrels and violent situations. One night, when she was six-years-old, her father almost killed her. At 21 she finally left home, convincing her parents she was going away to study to London. Her younger sister Farah soon followed her. Freedom was achieved at least until their mother tricked them into going to Pakistan on a family holiday: once in their native country, passports were confiscated and they were told they were not going back to England unless they married a spouse chosen by their mother. Threatened with gang rape and murder and almost on the brink of suicide, the two young women were saved by a male cousin and managed to go back to England. Recovering from the shock of being almost murdered was terrible, but Ferzanna eventually did it. She went on to have a daughter, Sophie, and later met her husband, military historian Michael Riley. “It took a long time to be able to build a relationship and be able to live,“ Riley says, “but I made it because I decided I would choose to be happy. I decided that you can’t help what’s happened to you in the past, but you can choose your future, you can be unhappy, you can miserable, you can be weighted down by all the things that have happened to you in the past and that other people have done to you, but it’s your choice how your future is going to turn out.”