Dr Hannana Siddiqui – ‘No Safe Place’: Honour, Abuse and Violence
Date: FRIDAY 28th OCTOBER 2022
Time: 3.30pm to 5pm
Place: TM2-02, London Metropolitan University, Holloway Rd, London, N7 8DB
The MA Woman and Child Abuse programme has some fantastically guest speakers this Autumn whose work speaks to the University’s Education for Social Justice Framework.
This lecture will examine how codes of honour are used to justify gender-based violence. It will also highlight the conflict between black feminist demands for recognition of honour-based abuse and anti-racist / multicultural concerns about ‘othering’ minority cultures and religions and undue interference in minority communities. It explores the discourse on intersectionality, violence against women and girls in black and minority communities, through the lens of honour-based abuse.
Dr Hannana Siddiqui is a multi-award winning activist, researcher and policy advocate working at Southall Black Sisters, which is a specialist organisation for black and minority founded in 1979. She has worked on violence against black and minority women and girls in the UK for about 40 years. Hannana was an original member of the first Home Office Working on Forced Marriage which reported in 2000, then subsequently helped to establish the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit, statutory and practice multi-agency forced marriage guidance and honour based abuse, and the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007. Hannana is widely published, and in 2022, she co-authored Bekhal Mahmod’s memoir, No Safe Place (Ad Lib Publishers) on her life and the honour killing of her sister, Banaz Mahmod. Hannana formulated ‘Banaz’s Law’ and is campaigning with Bekhal to introduce it. The law seeks to end the use of cultural or religious defences for gender based violence.
The event is open to colleagues and students within SSSP from London Metropolitan University (with priority for MA level students but not limited to them).
If you are interested in attending, please contact Sukhwant Dhaliwal at s.dhaliwal1@londonmet.ac.uk.