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Campaigners call for new homicide law for inciting suicide

PUBLISHED March 19, 2012
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Southall Black Sisters to launch women's campaign for a new offence of 'suicide aggravated by harassment or violence'

A campaign to introduce a new offence of "suicide aggravated by harassment or violence" is to be launched next month.

Calls for a new homicide law have been triggered by growing concern over police failures to investigate cases where women have killed themselves or attempted to do so because of violence and abuse.

Other vulnerable groups would also benefit from the new law, campaigners from Southall Black Sisters argue, including those who jump from high buildings after being jeered by onlookers or who kill themselves after being encouraged over the internet.

An estimated 10 women kill themselves every week after having experienced repeated abuse, according to Home Office statistics. Attempted or successful suicides among Asian women in the UK is more than three times higher, especially among young females between 15 and 24 years old, according to research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (1992).

Prosecutions, however, are rarely brought: there is no law in Britain against those who encourage someone to kill themselves without physically helping them.

As the law stands, coroners' courts are the only forum in which the state can be compelled to investigate why a person has taken their own life.

"At best, convoluted efforts are being made to hold perpetrators of violent or abusive conduct to account when a suicide results," said Pragna Patel, a founding member of Southall Black Sisters, which has a history of successfully forcing through new laws to protect women. "At worst, such deaths are not properly investigated at all."

"In our experience, in the face of violence or abuse, many women feel that they have no option but to self-harm or kill themselves," said Patel. "This state of affairs is especially disturbing in the context of a complete absence of any ? effective criminal prosecutions of perpetrators of abuse who are demonstrably culpable in causing a woman or vulnerable person to commit suicide."

Patel decided to launch the campaign after taking on the case of 23-year-old Nosheen Azam, who was found engulfed in flames in her garden in Sheffield in 2005.

Azam had come to the UK from Pakistan seven months earlier to live with her British husband, Amjid Hussein. Almost immediately, she began complaining to her family that she was being abused by some of her husband's family, Azam's father Mohammed says. Her distress escalated and, on the day she was found in flames, she had told her parents that she was frightened for her life, her father said.

Nobody knows whether someone tried to murder Azam, whether she was goaded into taking her own life, or whether she made her own decision: the young woman now lies in a hospital bed, brain-dead and with over 60% burns.

She is, says her father Mohammed: "a living corpse".

"There has been no concerted effort to find out what drove Nosheen to attempt to take her own life," said Patel. "If she had died, there would at least have been an inquest. Because there is no law of 'suicide aggravated by domestic violence', however, there is no motivation for the police to investigate whether it is a case of provable encouragement to suicide, despite that being nearly the same thing as murder."

A new homicide law could have wider applications such as in cases like that of Fiona Pilkington, who killed herself and her disabled daughter after repeated abuse by youths near their home in Hinckley.

It could be used in cases like that of Shaun Dykes, the 17-year-old boy who threw himself off the top of a shopping centre in Derby in 2008 after being goaded by onlookers, who filmed footage that later appeared on YouTube.

Patel criticised the current legal options available when a woman has killed herself after enduring domestic violence. It is up to campaigners to ask coroners courts to investigate why the suicide occurred. This, she said, is inadequate and "has enormous cost implications for campaigning groups like ours."

"There has to be some means of ensuring that those responsible for causing someone to take their life, are held criminally liable. The current state of affairs in untenable and cannot therefore be justified," she said.

Patel also wants the new law to encompass mental damage. "If a conduct of domestic violence or abuse results in psychological harm, however serious that may be ? there can be no basis upon which to bring a criminal prosecution under the present law on manslaughter."

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