Rethinking Antiviolence Strategies

Lessons from the Black Women's Movement in Britain

Julia Sudbury

In April 1998, women activists from Southall Black Sisters, a Black Women's organization at the forefront of breaking the silence around violence against South Asian women, picketed the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Their banners proclaimed their slogans: "Our Tradition, Struggle not Submission" and "Free Zoora Shah!" Five years earlier, Zoora, a Pakistani woman living in the conservative Muslim community of Bradford in the north of England, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life with a tariff (minimum time served) of twenty years. Zoora's story broke the stereotypes about South Asian women that have been a legacy of the colonial era in India. She was not passive, veiled, or submissive. Instead, she defended herself against a physically violent, sexually abusive, and financially exploitative man by poisoning him with arsenic. Zoora's case raised a strategic dilemma for women of color involved in activism against violence. The antiviolence movement has directed many of its demands toward the state, campaigning for specialist women police officers, domestic violence training for police and judges, and harsher sentences for abusive men. These demands share a common vision of the state as protector, standing between women and violent males. But for women convicted of defending themselves against a violent partner, the criminal justice system becomes a site of secondary victimization. And for all women prisoners, the state acts as a punitive perpetrator of violence, subjecting women to invasive body searches, emotional and physical isolation, and physical and verbal abuse. The challenge for women of color activists was to conceptualize the campaign for Zoora's freedom in a way that also created solidarity with other women found guilty of "offending" the state. Meeting that challenge has led to different approaches to resisting the criminalization of survival strategies by women of color.

Colonial Legacies and Patriarchal Violence

Like many violently abused women, Zoora's story starts many years earlier. In the early seventies, she came to Bradford, England, from rural Mirpur following an arranged marriage. She was beaten by her husband, and forced to undergo several abortions in order to avoid the birth of a girl. She was eventually thrown out by her husband's family and found herself homeless, unable to speak English and without any income to support her young children. When pregnant with her third child, she was befriended by Mohammed Azam, a married man who helped her buy a house since she was unable to obtain a mortgage in her own name. Although Zoora by then had her own income from working in a factory, she became financially dependent due to this arrangement and Azam quickly used this to his advantage, foreing her to have sex and becoming violent when she refused to obey him. Azam was also involved in trafficking drugs from Pakistan and when she traveled home on a visit, he demanded that she carry heroin. When he received a prison sentence for trafficking, he pimped her to former prisoners on their release. In her words: "I was used as a mattress by all the men in the community." Zoora turned to community elders for help, but Azam's brother was a prominent leader in the Bradford Council of Mosques and she was told that nothing could be done. On Azam's release from prison, Zoora became anxious because he had persuaded her daughter to enter "a business relationship" with him. Zoora had obtained arsenic in Pakistan believing that in small doses it would make Azam sexually impotent. Instead, she gave him a large dose and he died the same day at the hospital. In her original trial in 1993, Zoora denied killing Azam and did not reveal her experiences of abuse and exploitation:

She denied it because it was too shameful to admit the kind of abuse she was going through and she was part of the criminal underworld, this man is a convicted drug dealer involved in crime, his brother is a leader of the Bradford Council of Mosques, he's a community leader, he's got all the protection he would want. She didn't feel she could speak up and not risk her life and her children, so she didn't say it.

In 1998, with support from Southall Black Sisters, Zoora appealed her conviction on the grounds that she was suffering anxiety and severe depression at the time of Azam's death. The...