Poverty and Social Justice – Comment and analysis

The unspeakable murder of Sara Sharif

Posted on December 12, 2024December 12, 2024 by 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this horrific case of violence and abuse goes back to April 2023, when Sharif informed Sara’s school that she would be withdrawn and home-schooled with immediate effect.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.

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

New research shows impact of migration on home ownership

Posted on November 15, 2024November 15, 2024 by louis.stewart

Migrants who settled in their destination country are much less likely to be rent or mortgage free (48%) compared with those who returned to their origin country (84%), new research shows.

Findings from a first-of-its-kind study into migration and housing tenure indicate that settlers into multiple European countries are less likely to have a home of their own, both compared with the wider populations of the destination countries and those who never left (stayers) or who returned to their country of origin (returnees).

These findings are drawn from the pioneering 2000 Families Survey which conducted personal interviews with 5980 individuals nested within 1770 families who originated from Turkey.

The Survey located men who moved from Turkey to Europe as guestworkers and their comparators who stayed behind, and traced their families across Turkey and Europe up to the fourth generation.

Mortgage and rent-free living

The results show that 79% of the returnees, 56% of the stayers and 50% of the settlers own a house (with or without a mortgage) where they currently live.

Looking at those who have no mortgage on their property, or who live rent free, this applies to more than four fifths of the returnees (84%) and two thirds of the stayers (69%) but less than half (48%) of the settlers.

Mortgage holders in different housing markets

There are, however, tenure differences based on the housing market type of the destination country.

In countries with a regulated rental regime that places less emphasis on home ownership, such as Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the proportion of homeowner settlers (with or without a loan or mortgage) is, at 40%, not incomparable to the wider populations of these countries.

This is also true for countries with a regulated expansion regime, such as France and Belgium, that produce better homeownership outcomes for higher income groups. Here, 71% of settlers are homeowners, as compared with 63% and 73% of the wider populations in France and Belgium, respectively.

Strikingly, however, in countries with a liberal expansion regime that are renowned for their support of disadvantaged groups to buy their own homes, such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands, the proportion of homeowners is as low as 42% among the settlers while the figures for the wider national populations stand at 64% in Denmark, 83% in Norway, 70% in Sweden and 67% in the Netherlands.

Second homes

The research also shows that 51% of the settlers in Europe, mostly comprised of the first goers, possess a house in Turkey either jointly or individually. The analysis reveals that 64% of the settlers who own a house in Europe, and 42% of the settlers renting there, have part or full ownership of a house in Turkey.

Research implications

Lead author Dr Sebnem Eroglu, from the School for Policy Studies, said:

“Under the guest-worker agreements, labourers (typically men) from Turkey, and other Balkan and Southern European countries, were invited to contribute to the building of Northern and Western Europe. Despite their significant contributions to their economies and societies, the guestworkers and their descendants settled in Europe often find themselves disadvantaged against the destination country populations as well as their stayer and returnee counterparts.”

“We have found that returnees display the highest share of homeownership whereas the settlers’ share remains the lowest. This finding indicates the significance of migration in helping the returnees accumulate financial resources and convert them into housing assets in the country of origin whilst supporting the past research which documents the barriers faced by migrants in European housing markets – albeit to varying degrees.”

“It is striking that in the countries with a liberal expansion regime, where one would expect greater home ownership amongst the settlers, the figures remain significantly lower than the wider populations of the destination countries. A more positive picture emerges in the housing markets of other destinations, though still not as good as for those who returned to Turkey or never left.”

Co-authors

Eroglu, Sebnem
Bayrakdar, Sait (Dr, Warwick)
Guveli, Ayse (Prof, Warwick)

Additional information

See article published in Housing Studies journal: Full article: Understanding the consequences of international migration for housing tenure: evidence from a multi-site and intergenerational study

Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

Enforcing the Code: Betting shop employees and the contradictions of gambling harm reduction

Posted on August 20, 2024September 3, 2024 by School for Policy Studies

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.

Lockdown saw couples share housework and childcare more evenly – but these changes didn’t last

Posted on February 10, 2022January 10, 2025 by School for Policy Studies

Susan Harkness, University of Bristol

It may feel like a common occurrence today, but if you cast your mind back to the first COVID lockdown, having whole families working and studying from home was a very unfamiliar situation. And it was one that had unfamiliar consequences.

For opposite-sex couples, lockdown disrupted the traditional gender division of household chores. In research that my colleagues and I conducted, we found that having both partners at home saw men increase how much of the domestic burden they took on, so that women’s typically greater share decreased.

We discovered this by analysing data from Understanding Society, a big longitudinal household panel study – the largest of its kind. The study follows a sample of UK households, periodically asking them questions to see how their lives are changing. Between April 2020 and September 2021, its participants were asked to complete web surveys every few months specifically about the impact of the pandemic on their lives.

We looked at responses from people of working age who were in opposite-gender relationships that continued throughout this period of COVID surveying. This provided a final sample of just over 2,000 couples for us to analyse. Here’s what we discovered.

Lockdown shocks

The couples were asked about the gender division of housework during the first lockdown, and we then compared this with information collected from pre-lockdown surveys carried out during 2019. The couples were also asked whether those changes persisted when the first lockdown eased. On top of this, we also compared the changes experienced by those with no children at home and those with children of various ages.

What we saw was that overall, women’s share of housework fell from 65% pre-COVID to 60% during the first lockdown. So initially there was a moderate amount of gender rebalancing in the sharing of domestic work. However, by September 2020 the old gender divisions were being re-established. By this point, women were on average doing 62% of housework.

These changes coincided with changes in working behaviour. Overall, the findings showed that both men’s and women’s paid working hours reduced substantially in the spring of 2020 but had recovered by September.

And during the spring lockdown, around a third of both male and female respondents were employed but working from home. However, this had fallen to just under a quarter by September. Similarly, around one in five women and one in seven men were furloughed in the spring, but this had dropped to fewer than one in 20 by September.

This seems to suggest that having both members of a couple at home, with less time committed to work, leads to the domestic burden being more evenly shared.

Having both family members spending more time at home also appears to have led to there being more housework to be done. Both men and women increased their weekly hours of domestic work during lockdown – from 12.5 to 15.5 for women and from 6.5 to 10 for men. Come September 2020, these figures had fallen again, though they remained above their pre-lockdown levels.

Childcare burdens

However, the rebalancing of work wasn’t consistent across the couples we looked at. The extent of the change depended on the number and age of the couple’s children.

When the respondents were split into three groups – those who had no children living at home, those who had children under the age of five and those who had older children – marked differences emerged.

For couples without children at home, women’s share of domestic labour fell during the spring and continued to fall after the summer. Though these women still did more domestic work than their partners, their input did not return to pre-COVID levels as 2020 progressed.

For those with children aged between six and 15, the drop in women’s share of housework had partially reversed by September, but it hadn’t fully bounced back. In the autumn they were still doing less than before the pandemic.

But for those with children under five, the drop in women’s share of housework had reversed completely by September. This was despite the initial drop in the spring having been greater for this group compared to the other two.

Family dynamics

So what do we make of this? In terms of family dynamics, the lockdown may have had more lasting effects for some families than for others. Fears that advances in gender equality could be reversed during the pandemic were more real for those with very young children, who were much less able to keep themselves busy with other tasks and whose children were not old enough to make use of online education.

One important reason for the division of labour changing during lockdown was men’s and women’s working hours. Women with young children tended to reduce their paid working hours more as the pandemic progressed in order to take on the increased burden of care that stemmed from schools and nurseries being closed.

Our study shows that changes to family life during the pandemic were nuanced, with different family set-ups resulting in different changes to the balance of housework and the rebalancing of work changing over time. Indeed, there may be further nuances that we’re yet to fully identify.

In the future, it would be good to look at whether extended family networks were able to alleviate the increased care burden for some families. We could also look at how the pandemic affected the mental health of women with and without children, and it would be useful to see whether different countries’ lockdowns affected families differently as well.

Susan Harkness, Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Centre for Poverty and Social Justice, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.