from the School for Policy Studies
Castiglione, R. and Waddell, L.*
As PhD students specialising in social policy, with a focus respectively on the evolution of gender inequalities within familial settings and on women’s understanding and experiences of reproductive coercion, our participation in the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW68) as UK Delegates (more…)
By Professor Aisha K. Gill*
On Friday 15 November 2024, Sara Sharif’s father, Urfan Sharif, admitted to beating his daughter with a metal pole while she lay dying. Jurors at the Old Bailey heard that the 10-year-old was discovered dead in a bunkbed in the family home in Woking, Surrey, on 10 August 2023. Sharif, 42, and his wife Beinash Batool, 30, were found guilty of her murder at the Central Criminal Court of murdering the schoolgirl after perpetrating a year-long “campaign of abuse” against her. Sara’s uncle Faisal Malik 29, was found not guilty of murder but guilty of causing or allowing the death of a child. This horrifying case exposes the inadequate response of key services in cases involving Black and minoritised children like Sara.
Sara was born on 11 January 2013 in Slough, Berkshire, to Polish mother Olga Domin and Pakistani father Urfan Sharif, a taxi driver who moved to the UK in 2001.The couple married in 2009 but separated in 2015 and then divorced. Sara lived with her mother until custody was awarded to Sharif in 2019. She then lived with her father, her stepmother, Batool, the couple’s four children and her uncle, Malik, in Woking.
William Emlyn Jones KC suggested all three defendants were involved in Sara’s murder, although Sharif initially blamed Batool for Sara’s injuries: there were “multiple unexplained fractures in 25 locations” on Sara’s body, including a fracture to a bone in her neck, the vertebrae in her spine and in her hand. However, three weeks into the trial, he dramatically reversed his position and admitted to tying Sara up with the tape and hitting her with a cricket bat, metal pole and mobile phone in the days before she died. Asked why he had suddenly changed his evidence, he responded: “She was my daughter. I’ve been nasty, I’ve been mean with her. I couldn’t care for her; I didn’t do what a father should have done, and I’ll take responsibility for everything.”
The timeline for this horrific case of violence and abuse goes back to April 2023, when Sharif informed Sara’s school that she would be withdrawn and home-schooled with immediate effect. It was disclosed by a neighbour that “just before the Easter holidays [in 2023] she was in school and had cuts and bruises on her face and her neck.” The neighbour’s daughter asked what had happened and Sara said she’d fallen off a bike.
Shortly before her withdrawal from formal education, Sara’s primary school agreed to make a referral to social services because of a teacher’s concerns over bruises Sara had sustained; the court heard that a report was entered into the school’s child protection monitoring system on 10 March 2023. Yet six days after receiving this referral, Surrey County Council closed the investigation – why? Similarly, while the council and the police confirmed that they had contact with the family, the police described their interactions as “limited” and “historic”. Why was there no tracking by social services and the school of the reasons Sara was taken out of school given the “visible cuts and bruises on her face”? Why was there no monitoring of Sara after she was taken out of school?
The case raises serious questions about the paucity, at least initially, of these key service responses and of critical safeguarding by teachers and others at Sara’s school. We now know from the court case that the abuse was being perpetrated by multiple adults in her family, and that she endured the ordeal for many months. Her teachers, social services and the police failed to protect her by adequately investigating the visible signs of abuse she was experiencing, and this underscores the fact that crimes like these involving Black and minoritised children often go under-investigated—at least until the victim has been killed.
For instance, my research has highlighted the role of cultural factors in concealing child abuse, including how notions of ‘honour’ often act as barriers to disclosure. Although honour and its inverse, shame, have been explored in many scholarly discussions of gendered violence in Asian communities, more work could enable culturally competent responses to child abuse cases, particularly by recognising the unique barriers and difficulties that racially minoritised victims face—these include shame, fear of being disbelieved, and self-blame. Identifying these factors and exploring how they can inhibit and facilitate disclosure would strengthen preventive strategies and improve treatment, support and understanding for all victims.
In Sara’s case, many bystanders also failed to disclose what was happening to her. One of Sara’s neighbours told the court they heard screaming, “constant crying” and “banging” coming from the Sharif family’s previous home, a flat in West Byfleet: “It almost seemed like [the children had] been locked in a bedroom, that constant rattling of a door, trying to get it open,” they said. They had often heard Batool “almost hysterical, screaming” at the children and her use of abusive language towards them. The neighbour once asked Batool if everything was OK and had “the door shut in my face”; they did not take their concerns further, and nor did the next person who lived in the flat, who told the court they thought they heard “smacking” from downstairs followed by a scream. Asked whether they had contacted the authorities, they said they “convinced [themselves] that everything was OK”: “I spoke to people and was told to mind my own business and ignore [it].” Someone who lived near the Sharif family’s next home, the house in Woking where Sara was killed, told police they heard a child’s scream in the days before the murder. “It did not sound good. I wondered to myself whether I should tell someone… I did not hear another scream or any other noise so I did not take it any further.”
It’s difficult to confront the fact that none of these neighbours intervened. But while barriers to disclosure in specific contexts remain opaque, it’s incredibly difficult to encourage bystanders and victims, especially children, to disclose swiftly and thus prevent further abuse. This can only be achieved by locating child abuse within an intersectional framework that enables effective examination of the dominant paradigms that may reduce this form of violence to a cultural or religious problem. All support agencies must work together to implement a more nuanced understanding of child abuse that addresses both the commonalities and particularities of such crimes across and within communities. It is therefore imperative that any review of the institutional failure to protect Sara from her family brings together all relevant partners—the police, health, social care and education—and robustly examines their practices to prevent a murder like this from happening again.
You can also listen to the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza and Professor Aisha K Gill discussing the issues around this case on BBC Radio 4 – Woman’s Hour, 12/12/2024
Author details
Aisha K. Gill, Ph.D., FRSA CBE is an internationally and nationally acknowledged grassroots gender-based violence activist/researcher with over 20+ years’ experience, focused on Black and minoritized communities’ women and girls’ experiences of forced marriage, rape, policing, sexual violence, child exploitation, FGM/C, and femicidal violence in the name of ‘honour’, which relates to issues around the intersections between law, policy and practice. She is currently Professor of Criminology and Head of Centre for Gender and Violence Research in the School for Policy Studies, at the University of Bristol. In 2024, she was appointed Board of Trustees of Ashiana Network. [https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/aisha-k-gill | ak.gill@bristol.ac.uk ]
Photo credit: Aisha K. Gill
Blog republished from Bristol Social Harm and Crime Research Group
By Nadia Aghtaie*
By Miriam Merkova *
Survivor. This is such a powerful word, with a highly significant meaning, yet, in the violence against women and girls sector, it is often applied narrowly to describe those who have engaged with the services. “We need to consult with survivors” is a statement that is often issued by policymakers (more…)
By Dr Sam Kirwan and Dr Jo Large
One unmissable aspect of the post-Covid, cost-of-living crisis is the ongoing collapse of high-street retail. Yet, alongside the charity shops and vape sellers, one sector remains relatively intact; betting remains an integral part of the British high street, with a prevalence directly inverse to surrounding socio-economic indicators.
There has been no shortage of critique regarding the role played by high-street betting in contributing to conditions of poverty under austerity. When in 2014 Aditya Chakrabortty described the high-street betting sector as a form of ‘predatory capitalism’, he was highlighting the ways in which the liberalised gambling sector appears to reflect the very worst dynamics of neoliberal society. As Markham and Young and Banks and Waters have argued, the modern gambling industry, characterised by a concentration of power and expansion of influence, appears boundless in its will to extract maximum profit from its customers, with little regard for the ways in which its products amplify misery and inequality. Among the many critiques of the role of the Gambling Commission (the regulator created by the 2005 Gambling Act), the most damning is that it has enabled the proliferation of harm by emphasising ‘safer gambling’ frameworks without challenging these underlying logics of exploitation and extraction
Amidst these critiques of the high-street betting sector, there has been a lack of attention to the betting shop as a space of employment (Rebecca Cassidy’s fascinating ethnography of betting shops remains an outlier in this respect). This lack of interest is unusual given how the role of betting-shop employee has changed so drastically since the 2005 Gambling Act, and also given that much of the responsibility for reducing gambling harm in the premises-based sector falls upon the frontline employees who must implement the components of the ‘Social Responsibility Code’ (SRC) (part of the Licensing Conditions and Code of Practice). These include the need to intervene when there are indicators of ‘problem gambling’, to enforce self-exclusion schemes, and to carry out age-verification procedures.
Our research
Over the summer and autumn of 2023 we carried out semi-structured interviews with current and retired frontline employees in the sector. Whilst our focus was on the implementation of these ‘safer gambling’ approaches implemented in the SRC, these interviews covered a range of employment issues, often returning to issues of personal safety within an aggression-laden environment, and how betting practices and environments had changed in their time within the sector.
Most of our participants expressed a strong feeling that intervening in customers’ gambling habits, where there was a clear potential for harm, was something they felt staff should be doing. Many talked positively about when they had been able to encourage a customer to reflect upon their gambling and the harms it was creating. Despite the difficulties in implementing self-exclusion schemes they were seen to be a valuable tool that staff would always seek to enforce. Many of their reflections were in line with the underlying narratives of the SRC regarding the capacity for employees to prevent harm within the shop.
But participants also felt that the conditions for being able to carry out this harm-reduction work had significantly deteriorated in the era of Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), single-manning and multi-shop work (the mandating of staff running shops on their own and moving between shops without warning), and the profit-driven orientation of the modern gambling conglomerates. In these conditions, aspects of the SRC were experienced as factors that exacerbated the stresses and anxiety of work rather than reducing them. When participants were reflecting upon this most critically, these codes were seen as a way of shifting responsibility from operators onto frontline employees: making sure that it is staff that bear the risk and anxiety of reducing gambling harm.
An example of this raised in our interviews was the difficulty of acting on the back-office alerts created by FOBTs regarding excessive time or spend. Many noted the anxiety and fear of dismissal if they failed to act on these alerts and other potential indicators of ‘problem gambling’, despite the fact that coming out from behind the screen might itself be a disciplinary offence if it meant not being able to take bets. They could also put themselves in a potentially dangerous situation in the context of the customer aggression created by FOBTs.
There has been widespread criticism of the idea that a liberalised market, creating deliberately addictive and harmful products that enable the vast transfer of wealth from the most vulnerable in society to the most privileged, can be tamed or constrained by ‘safer gambling’ codes that rely on customers recognising their own ‘problem gambling’ and taking preventative action. We argue that what should be added to this critique are the ways in which this structure has shifted responsibility for gambling harm onto low-paid, precarious workers, who are balancing competing demands in the aggressive and stressful environment created by this industry approach. A desperate need for gambling reform has been eloquently articulated by Van Schalkwyk and Cassidy, among others. We argue that consideration of high-street gambling as a space of employment should be part of this reform. It should not remain possible for operators to continue to offer products that are intrinsically harmful, in spaces that are intrinsically unsafe, and be allowed to shift the responsibility and risk for any ensuing harms onto their lowest-paid employees.
This blog was originally published by the Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research. The original article can be viewed on their website. The research was funded by the Hub’s Research Innovation Fund.