A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a 'no-go area' for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: 'The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people write about this?'My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. 'You must write about this,' she begged.
'I can't,' I said. 'Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.'
She shook her head. 'I can't be identified,' she said. 'I would be killed. And so would the women.'
So there you have it. After weeks of wondering what to do, inspired by the Archbishop, I've taken her word that she is telling the truth, respected her anonymity, and written it anyway.
And this, I imagine, is what the Archbishop wants for the whole of England. As they used to say in my father's country parish: 'Heaven preserve us!' I wonder what they're saying there today. Expressions somewhat shorter and sweeter, I fear.
Ruth adds this video of a 2006 Muslim protest in Britain, showing what the UK is up against.
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DavidTC:
OK, I take some of your points. I can't go around making wild allegations. I do, however, know people who have had direct contact, and I myself have had direct contact in some cases, with appalling things being allowed in the Muslim community, mostly to do with forced marriage, and prevention of apostasy / escape from social control. A teacher friend pulled out all the plugs trying to stop the forced marriage of an early-teen girl to an old man back in Pakistan (she'd been seen talking to some boys at a bus-stop), but the social workers were up their own multicultural arses. There was also the case in the news recently about the murdered Manchester girl, whose parents basically got away with it, whether it was them or someone else in the community who actually killed the girl.
There is also the barrage of death threats received by anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who criticises anything about Islam or Pakistani culture. About this point, I half feel that what the UK needs is the right to bear arms.
"he seems to be saying that the problem isn't people operating outside the law here, it's that, too often, they ship women and children back to Pakistan (Always Pakistan, for some reason) where they have no rights at all.
Which is bad, but doesn't really seem to have anything do with laws in the UK. "
Well, in practical terms, it doesn't really matter whether you kill a girl here or take her back to Pakistan to be killed.
Of course, other communities at times have behaved objectionably. The Sikhs in Britain sometimes have family behaviours that are milder versions of Muslim behaviour. The Jews in Europe used to have appalling coercion inside the ghettos. However, a big difference is that Sikhs and Jews do not think everyone should be Sikh or Jewish. I do think that is crucial.
"But stop trying to claim the solution to those problems to less immigration. "
It wasn't me that made that claim - it might have been Guerrero something or other. In a country as crowded as Britain, I don't thihk immigration is such a good thing, but I don't have the obsession with ethnic Englishness that he/she does. I think immigration has had many positive aspects - it's just Islam that I object to.
"b) there's a large group of people here who think your problems are magically going to show up here, and they're using it to justify the idea that Islam is our enemy and we must go out into the world and fight it. (Which means you're going to get more refugees as we destroy yet more countries, and have nowhere to send the women to safety.)"
OK, point taken. I was against the Iraq Invasion from the start. I just can't see the point, unless the occupiers were to initiate a 100-year process of de-Islamification (which they're not).
I do think the problems are likely to turn up in the USA. I think they almost inevitably will if the Muslims there keep practising their religion. I think that invading Muslim countries is almost exactly the wrong way to approach this issue.
DavidTC:
I haven't read all of it, but this recent study appears to document wide-spread honor crimes in the UK:
http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/pdf/CrimesOfTheCommunity.pdf
Okay, forget about that, David . . . How about this:
"A Question of Honor"
" . . . official figures on forced marriages are the tip of the iceberg, says the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
"It warns that the number of girls falling victim to forced marriages, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder by relatives intent on upholding the "honour" of their family is up to 35 times higher than official figures suggest. . . .
"Marilyn Mornington, a district judge and chair of the Domestic Violence Working Group, warned that fears of retribution, and the authorities' failure to understand the problem completely, meant the vast majority of victims were still too scared to come forward for help. In evidence to the home affairs committee, which is investigating the problem, she said: "We need a national strategy to identify the large number of pupils, particularly girls, missing from school registers who have been taken off the register and are said to be home schooled, which leads to these issues. Airport staff and other staff need to be trained to recognise girls who are being taken out of the country.. . . .
"Women who have been taken overseas to be married against their will are now being rescued on an almost daily basis. . ."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/a-question-of-honour-police-say-17000-women-are-victims-every-year-780522.html
Well, in practical terms, it doesn't really matter whether you kill a girl here or take her back to Pakistan to be killed.
In practical terms, no, in terms of what if UK can stop, yes, it does matter. The UK cannot stop parents from leaving with their children unless they have actually committed pre-existing child abuse. It's not a matter of blindness to the problem, it's that there is no legal right to remove someone's children from them like that. And countries have a presumption of validity of marriages from other places, although it would be nice if they would alter their laws to keep from recognizing underaged ones. (Or at least under-age-of-consent ones, which is probably a more reasonable standard.)
As for adult women, the way to solve that is shelters and education. Which I'm sure you already know. The way to make women safer is to educate women...they aren't literally held prisoner in their house, they can walk out the door or call the police. And they certainly can't be forced to fly on an airplane and keep silent. If they know they can do that, if they know they'll be given someplace to live and kept safe.
I do think the problems are likely to turn up in the USA. I think they almost inevitably will if the Muslims there keep practising their religion. I think that invading Muslim countries is almost exactly the wrong way to approach this issue.
Most Muslims here consider themselves Americans, which is, exactly why I'm suspecting you have the problem, in that most Muslims in in the UK don't consider themselves British (UKish? That's not right.) but people living just in the UK.
The British Empire has, somewhat oddly, a history of living besides other cultures and basically ignoring them, although it's usually someplace besides the British Isles. If you're going to wander around invading people, leaving their culture intact is probably a somewhat good strategical choice, but it's dumb when they're in your house.
However, and this is where you and I differ. You think that replacing their culture requires them changing their religion. It doesn't, really. You simply have to have assimilated people already here, and they'll run mosques, and the mosques will preach 'American Islam'just like the temples preach 'American Judaism' and the covens(?) preach 'American Wicca' or whatever.(1)
And that's not going to change, because we already have an 'Americanize Islam' structure in the US. I guess it could, in theory, disappear if we threw open our borders. But, then again, throughout our entire history we've averaged about 16% immigrants making up the population at any one time, and it doesn't seem to result in any lasting problems, because of our magic trick of making Americans out of them in two generations. As long as we don't overload the system.
Why this didn't happen in your country is either due to your different treatment of immigrants (I know that's why it happened in France, because France is insufferably proud of their culture and to assimilate another culture your own has to take a ding or two.) or because you accepted too many, too fast.
OTOH, you have a chance to make a difference if you don't close your borders, but instead force your way into those people's lives and communities. That is the way to make them British. And get American Muslims to reach out to them also, because American Islam is basically what you want British Islam to be.
1) It helps that a lot of Muslims are coming from the other direction here. We had a huge African-American Muslim movement during the sixties that resulted in a branch of Islam called 'Nation of Islam' being created, and since then a lot of those guys have converted to Sunni Islam, and they, obviously, never lived in a Muslim country.
David TC said:
". . . American Islam is basically what you want British Islam to be. . ."
________
Sure about that?
http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/45.pdf
(These guys run something like 80% of our mosques, btw)
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