Bloomberg reports that “honor crimes” have historically been ignored by British law enforcement officials:

Samaira Nazir rejected Pakistani suitors chosen by her family and planned to elope with her Afghan boyfriend. The penalty for her defiance: death from 18 stab wounds inflicted by her brother and cousin at the family home in Southall, England.

More than a dozen women are killed for violating community standards each year in the U.K., according to police. While Nazir’s killers were jailed for life, U.K. police ignore hundreds of “honor crimes” to avoid inflaming relations with Muslim enclaves as they work to head off homegrown terror plots, say lawmakers and women’s rights advocates.

“There is a kid-gloves approach on the basis that you don’t want to offend these communities,” says Usha Sood, a lawyer and lecturer at Nottingham Trent University who specializes in forced marriage cases. “If you take into account the whole range of honor offenses, the number runs into the thousands.”

[...]

Honor violence includes abduction, forced abortion and rape, police say. Most incidents involve South Asian families, Sood says, adding that counselors also help victims with Kurdish, Afghan, Nigerian and Turkish backgrounds.

[...]

Sometimes violence stems from the desire to keep women isolated from the modern world.

“Girls are being beaten up for things like having a mobile phone,” says Sanghera, 41, who runs the Karma Nirvana shelter for women in Derby, England. The group deals with seven forced marriages a week, and about four cases each month of people under the threat of murder, she says.

Typical of those seeking help is an 18-year-old who asked to be identified only as Serena. She says she sought help through Karma Nirvana after her father beat her repeatedly for six years. After a suicide attempt at 15, she was sent to Pakistan and kept there for a year before she returned to a hostile home.

“The whole house was against me — dad, mum, sisters, all of them,” she says. “Then I took a big step and went for a fresh start.” After four months on the run, Serena is taking classes and maintaining phone contact with her mother from the city where she’s in hiding. “If my uncles find out where I am, they will kill me for sure,” she says.

[...]

“Communities would prefer to turn a blind eye, and anyone who raises the issue is either a racist or an Islamophobe,” [Member of Parliament Ann] Cryer says at a tea lounge at the House of Parliament.