Why do the police still not know how to deal with honour killings?
The murder of Banaz Mahmod, a Kurdish Muslim woman, by her father and uncle, has brought the practice of honour killings to the attention of the public and has again emphasised the plight of Asian women caught between traditional religious customs and modern Western values. Moreover, the death of Miss Mahmod, 20, forces us to examine how such crimes are treated by the criminal courts and raises a question about the quality of policing in such cases. The police believe that there may be as many as 12 such killings in the UK every year. They are typically perpetrated by relatives of the victims or by members of their community and are usually planned well in advance. In 2003 British police attended a conference at The Hague to discuss the increasing numbers of people dying in this way. At the time Andy Baker, head of the serious crime directorate of the Metropolitan Police, said that “police had been unaware and ignorant of crimes that were going on” and admitted that honour killing was
