Liberals would rather risk the death
of a child like Sara Sharif than
appear racist.
To prevent further sad stories like hers, we must make it clear that the
price of living in our country is abiding by our values!
Allison Pearson
12 December 2024 7:45pm GMT
We will never know precisely what killed Sara Sharif. The 10-year-old’s body suffered at least 25 fractures and 71 external injuries including human bite marks and burns made with an iron. That beautiful little girl had been beaten with a cricket bat, tied to a radiator and her back was broken with a force said to be comparable to that of falling from a 20ft height.
When Surrey police broke into the Sharif family home, after a tip-off from Sara’s father, Urfan Sharif, they found hoods made from plastic bags, with a small hole for the mouth, which forensic evidence showed would be fixed to Sara’s face. Before fleeing to Pakistan, Urfan called police to explain he had not meant to kill his daughter, but that he had beaten her up “too much” for being naughty.
The details of Sara’s torture and eventual murder at the hands of her father and wicked stepmother, Beinash Batool, were so horrific that even my mild-mannered Christian colleague Tim Stanley was moved to volunteer himself for a firing squad.
Which of us would not overcome our objections to capital punishment and flick the switch on an electric chair for a monster who was deaf to his child’s “gut-wrenching screams” often heard by neighbours and who, by his depraved actions, disgraced the name of “father”. The creator and protector became the destroyer.
Although I did my best to screen them out, there were three details of Sara’s ordeal that lodged in my mind. The first was a creepy picture of her wearing full make-up and looking more like a bride-to-be than a prepubescent child. Make-up was applied by Batool to conceal her stepdaughter’s injuries.
As did the hijab that Sara started wearing to school in January 2023 and which hid cuts and bruises on her face and head. This was a cunning move by the abusive couple. They were not religiously observant, and no other female in the Sharif family covered her hair, but they clearly believed that a Muslim headscarf would cause teachers to feel awkward about examining Sara too closely lest they cause offence.
Tragically, the abusers’ calculation that Western liberals are so terrified of appearing racist or Islamophobic that they would rather run the risk of a child suffering and dying than challenge an Islamic cultural practice proved correct. Multiple opportunities to save Sara were lost.
The third thing that gave me pause was Urfan Sharif’s claim: “I legally punished her.” There is no English law which gives a parent the go-ahead to restrain and hood their child, nor to beat them with an iron bar improvised from the leg of a high chair. When Sharif said he “legally punished” Sara, he was referring to what is routinely done to daughters in Pakistan, and too often continues within the Pakistani community in the United Kingdom, which has remarkably little connection with what is considered acceptable in the country they supposedly live in.
Of course, there is abhorrent child abuse within white families – think of the murder of Baby Peter which shocked the nation – but there is no doubt that certain Muslim men in conservative households seem to feel they still have a right to “discipline” girls with physical violence, an attitude which largely died out here by the 1960s.
As Dame Louise Casey observed in her superb 2016 report into integration, “I found… high levels of social and economic isolation in some places and cultural and religious practices in communities that are not only holding some of our citizens back but run contrary to British values and sometimes our laws. Time and time again, I found it was women and children who were the targets of these regressive practices. And too often, leaders and institutions were not doing enough to stand up against them and protect those who were vulnerable.”
Sara Sharif was born in the UK on Jan 11 2013. She was a British girl, then, a bubbly, “often sassy” little girl who loved to sing and dance, fully deserving of all the freedoms and protections enjoyed by any British girl, but the brutal truth is she might as well have been born in rural Pakistan.
So reticent has the UK been in demanding immigrants sign up to our values, so keen to tiptoe around behaviour which we would otherwise find despicable, that Urfan Sharif and patriarchal brutes like him have been allowed to import a misogynistic culture that keeps their women living in a foreign land.
I first noticed this cultural segregation in the Eighties when I was doing teacher training and observing a primary-school year-group in west London. It was July and the girls were wearing summer uniform: pretty blue-and-white gingham dresses, ankle socks and T-bar sandals. But not the Muslim girls. They still wore rollneck sweaters under a thick tunic, woollen tights, trousers and a hijab from about the age of nine, I think. It wasn’t just their clothing that was different; they weren’t allowed to join the swimming lessons or come with us on a trip to Hampton Court. When I said to a teacher that I didn’t like the fact that the Muslim girls (but not the boys) were being left behind, she said their parents had objected. “Something to do with them seeing Henry VIII’s bed,” she said.
What? There I was, still young, rather idealistic and passionate about women’s rights, being told I should forget all that when it came to Muslim girls. “Celebrate our differences,” cooed the fashionable educational mantra of the time. But what was there to celebrate if those differences were really offensive to British values? Were we supposed to shut up about the girls being treated as second-class citizens in the name of multiculturalism?
I became very fond of a little girl called Hatice, who was one of those banned from school trips, swimming and wearing the summer uniform. Monkish cap of thick dark hair clearly cut at home with kitchen scissors, huge chocolate-button eyes in a round face full of mischief. She was seven years old and she never walked, preferring to skip everywhere. One day, I can’t remember why, I was asked to escort Hatice home to a nearby block of flats.
I knocked several times on the door, which, after a few minutes, was opened by a woman. I had never seen anything like it. She wore a sort of black metal contraption on her face; a band across the forehead was soldered by a more slender thread down her nose to a mask made of two winged pieces. (The battoulah, as it is called, is a sort of niqab, I found out later, a modesty face veil worn mainly in the Gulf region.) You could see her eyes and her chin. The little girl stepped forward and buried her head in the folds of the woman’s long black dress. On the walk back to school, I had so many disturbing questions: will Hatice have to wear one of those terrible things? That can’t be right. Surely, they won’t let that happen to a girl born here?
Forty years later, I saw a picture of the murdered Sara Sharif and she reminded me of Hatice (same chocolate-button eyes, same sassy attitude, same smile) and I know the answer now. They aren’t going to do anything for girls like Sara or Hatice. They are the dirty little secret of equality, diversity and inclusion, the collateral damage caused by the great lie of cultural cohesion. We never made it clear to their fathers that the price of admission to this country was that they check their retrograde attitudes to women and girls at the door. We should have spelt it out: these are our values, which we consider superior to yours in many respects. Your girls will wear the gingham summer uniform, they will learn to swim and Henry VIII’s bed will be part of their education because they are British now. And no one “legally” punishes their daughter here with boiling water and cricket bats.
Didn’t happen. A combination of the Left’s hatred of Britishness (perversely preferring every other culture to our own, even the nasty ones) and the Right’s economic greed for immigration at such a speed that integration became impossible, saw to that.
A call this week from a Conservative MP to ban first-cousin marriage is the right idea half a century too late. It’s not just that marriage between near-relations leads to a moderate but distressing increase in disabled babies. Importing brides and grooms from the Indian subcontinent perpetuates a “clan system” which is a major barrier to embracing the British way of life.
Here is Louise Casey spelling out the consequences: “Rates of integration in some communities have been undermined by high levels of transnational marriage – with subsequent generations being joined by a foreign-born partner, creating a ‘first generation in every generation’ phenomenon in which each new generation grows up with a foreign-born parent. This seems particularly prevalent in South Asian communities.” Casey said that, on one visit to a northern town, she discovered that all except one of the Asian councillors had married a wife from Pakistan. And in a cohort study at Bradford Royal Infirmary, 80 per cent of babies of Pakistani ethnicity in the area had at least one parent born outside the UK.
I’m afraid to say that having a wife who can’t speak English suits some Muslim men very well (Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups have the lowest levels of English language proficiency of any black or minority ethnic group and women in those communities are twice as likely as men to have poor English). Conveniently, it makes it much harder to escape a violent and abusive marriage. Although Sara’s stepmother, Beinash Batool, could speak English quite well, messages to her sister disclose an extraordinary cultural tolerance of her “violent disciplinarian” husband. “Urfan beat the crap out of Sara,” and, “She’s covered in bruises, literally beaten black,” she texted in May 2021. “I feel really sorry for Sara”... “Poor girl can’t walk.” She said, “I really want to report him” – but she never did. In fact, Batool aided and abetted that poor, brutalised girl’s murder.
Sara was in danger from the day she was born. Due to a history of parental violence, the baby was immediately made subject to a child protection plan. It’s heartbreaking to think that the only time in her brief life when she was truly safe was when she was placed into foster care for a short period in 2014 and, later, in a refuge after her Polish biological mother, Olga Domin, accused Urfan Sharif of domestic abuse. Unbelievably, Sara was returned to live with her fiend of a father after a family court ruling in October 2019. (What fool of a judge allowed that?) Time and again, she was horribly let down, a catalogue of injuries explained away while she was doomed to die in plain sight. Hard not to suspect that “cultural sensitivity” – or fear of Islamophobia – made the authorities nervous and granted Sara’s diabolical daddy the benefit of the doubt.
Of course Sara Sharif was failed by social services and police and teachers, and an inquiry will rightly point the finger at the guilty parties, but the uncomfortable truth is it was Britain that allowed a parallel world of women-hating and vicious control of girls to take root here. Britain has looked the other way while too many men have imported attitudes and practices which deeply offend. Stronger safeguards for children being home-educated is the Government’s response to Sara’s torture and murder, but that is a predictably cowardly failure to confront a much wider issue that the left would rather ignore.
“We continue to make great strides in gender equality. But in many areas of Britain the drive towards equality and opportunity across gender might never have taken place,” Louise Casey remarked in her report. “Women in some communities are facing a double onslaught of gender inequality, combined with religious, cultural and social barriers preventing them from accessing even their basic rights as British residents. And violence against women remains all too prevalent – in domestic abuse but also in other criminal practices such as female genital mutilation, forced marriage and so-called ‘honour’-based crime.”
Sara Sharif was a British girl who died because she didn’t really live in Britain at all. She lived in a violent male clan culture 4,000 miles away that happened to have relocated to Surrey. If we are serious about preventing more tragedies, then we must, like France, ban the hijab in schools, we must ban the burqa and the hateful niqab that shocked me to the core when I saw Hatice’s mother wearing a version of it all those years ago. We must insist that women in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities learn English and participate in the workplace. We must make it crystal clear that the price of living in our country is abiding by our values.
No more dirty little secrets of diversity, no more beautiful sassy little girls being collateral damage in the great lie of cultural cohesion. And when they say, “Shhh, think of cultural sensitivities,” we will reply, “Good idea. Where is the cultural sensitivity to us?”
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