Author: School for Policy Studies

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this horrific case of violence and abuse goes back to April 2023, when Sharif informed Sara’s school that she would be withdrawn and home-schooled with immediate effect.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.

Part of the issue here is that police officers are inexperienced and ill-equipped when it comes to tackling such crimes. There has been very little research exploring the specific problem of child abuse from a multidisciplinary perspective. One reason for this gap is that the recent foregrounding in media and policy discourses of child abuse in racially minoritised communities has taken place through the lens of cultural essentialism, occluding the causes of child abuse by focusing on racialised elements, such as the role of traditional cultural practices. As Black and racially minoritised children are located at the intersection of multiple, overlapping structural inequalities, their specific experiences of victimisation are still largely overlooked in the criminological literature, even though solid progress has been made during the last decade in understanding child abuse in British Asian communities.

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.

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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

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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