Honour And The BBC

A recent BBC Panorama programme about ‘honour killing’ in the UK, focused on murders committed in order to avenge ashamed families or in order to prevent further shame being brought upon them. Below is a link to the video.

Throughout the programme the narrator fails to mention that this phenomenon is almost exclusively from the Muslim community.Even when the news report was published here on the BBC, the article does not once use the word ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’. 

In some Islamic countries, what we call 'honour killings' are actually legal, and in many homes in the UK, women are oppressed, forced to dress and behave in certain ways, or even imprisoned or physically abused, in order to uphold these same religious laws. 

*    *    *

This video is the full programme:

It is well known that many Jewish or Hindu families in the UK would feel the same emotions if their son or daughter had a relationship with someone from another religion, or if they married into another faith or caste. In many cases the shame brought on the family could lead to isolation or a disowning of the person involved, but do any such cases lead to murder?

Honour killings are not exclusive to the Muslim communities, but to produce a detailed report on the subject and to fail to mention that the overwhelming vast majority of cases are from the Islamic community is a major subversion of the truth and suggests that these things happen with all communities in the UK.

It is important that we do not use offensive language or misrepresent information that may unfairly single out or demonise specific communities or stoke racial hatred, but the deliberate omission of this central piece of information is truly shocking.

Let us imagine that there was a spate of attacks and murders on the gay community, and the BBC reported that gay people were being attacked on a regular basis throughout the country, but failed to mention that the perpetrators were all fanatics from the Catholic church. How then would we as a society go about trying to solve the problem if the majority of the public were unaware of the whole truth and thought instead that there was a general widespread rise in homophobia in all British communities?

The risk of causing offense to a group of people is no reason to withhold the truth. If Laura Wilson, one of the victims in the programme (at 17min15sec in the video above), had been educated about the potential dangers of letting her lover’s Muslim parents find out about their relationship, perhaps she would not have confronted them and would not have been killed.

The BBC is known for presenting all news in a fair, informative and unbiased way, but its recent decision to present ‘honour killing’ in this way devalues its reputation. Anyone in favour of free, open and responsible press in this country must disagree with this action. Any self-respecting journalist would be ashamed to put their name on an article that deliberately leaves out such a central piece of information.

What is particularly insulting, is the way that the narrator talks about ‘south Asian and middle eastern communities’ and ‘young Asians,’ as if this type of practice is common to all communities from this part of the world. Probably the most disturbing part of the video is at 22min05sec where the narrator reports about a poll of ‘500 Asian men and women.’ What does Asian mean here? Does it include Hindus? Bhuddists? Sri-Lankans? Chinese? Japanese? 

We expect better from the BBC.

*    *    *

Michael Coren on the subject following a honour killing case in Canada: