Honor deaths on rise in England

It sucks to be a woman in a tribal, Islamic culture, even in the west. Become too corrupted and sully the family name, and you have to die to restore your family's honor.

Home Office statistics suggest that there are 12 such murders each year. However, according to research, the true figure is much higher. At a conference in Southampton last week, police chiefs revealed that they are re-examining 2,000 deaths and-murders between 1996 and 2006 to establish whether they involve honour killings. So far, 19 have now been found to be honour killings. A further 20 involved some element of "honour violence".

The string of deaths is likely to include some that were previously deemed suicides but have been found to be forced suicides and murder disguised as suicide.

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"It's very significant that the numbers of young Asian women between the ages of 16 and 24 who take their own lives is three times higher than the national average.

"But since the jailing of Banaz Mahmod's father and uncle for murder we are facing a major problem in that it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince Asian women that British police will take them seriously."

In court, it was disclosed that Banaz, who was Kurdish, had told police on four occasions that her family was trying to kill her. However, instead of protecting her, they dismissed her claims as melodramatic and even told her family, in clear breach of police guidelines that state that the families of women threatened with death for "dishonouring" them should not be approached.

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One senior police source admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that, if the scheme had been in place, Banaz might have been alive today. "We started to learn lessons," he said, "and then stopped learning them as a result of political correctness."

One young woman, too scared to be identified, tells a shocking tale of brutality at the hands of her family. When she refused a forced marriage her three elder brothers lured her to a relative's home and beat her for an hour. "I was bleeding and my nose was broken," she says, "but even so my brother handed me lighter fuel and a box of matches and said, 'You know what you have to do. Do it or we will do it for you'." She was rescued by friends but knows that if her family ever find her she will be killed.