Honour Based Violence

(asked on 15th October 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the implications for her policies of the debate on so-called honour crimes at the Council of Europe on 28 September 2021.


Answered by
Rachel Maclean Portrait
Rachel Maclean
This question was answered on 20th October 2021

So called 'honour’-based abuse (HBA) is a terrible form of abuse, and we are clear that we will not allow political or cultural sensitivities to get in the way of tackling it. No-one should suffer because of who they are or what community they are born into.

Our focus remains on preventing these crimes from happening, supporting and protecting survivors and those at risk, and bringing perpetrators to justice. The Home Office is providing up to £150,000 to the charity Karma Nirvana this year to run its national HBA helpline; between April and September 2021 the helpline provided assistance to 1,212 users of the service. The joint Home Office/Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Forced Marriage Unit has provided advice and support for thousands of victims of forced marriage and delivers regular training to police officers and social workers.

The Government’s recent Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy set out a number of further actions to tackle HBA, including that the Home Office will seek out community advocates who can talk to community audiences to explain why HBA practices are wrong, that the College of Policing will produce advice for police officers to advise both first responders and investigators on how to deal with cases of HBA, and that the Department for Health and Social Care will work to criminalise ‘virginity testing’ to send a clear message that this practice is wholly unacceptable in our society.

We welcome the insights communicated in the debate at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe last month. The Government pays close attention to the experiences of our international partners in tackling HBA and works closely with them in tackling it. For example, in 2018 the Government signed a protocol on female genital mutilation (FGM) with the United States to increase collaboration and the sharing of intelligence between the two countries. This enabled the UK and the United States to run Operation Limelight (a joint operation between border staff and the police which seeks to raise awareness of FGM and forced marriage at the border in order to safeguard potential victims) concurrently at several ports in the two countries.

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