Women of colour are being repeatedly failed – and paying with their lives 

On November 14, 2024, 24-year-old Harshita Brella, who was living in Corby, Northamptonshire, was found dead in the boot of a car in London. 

Northamptonshire Police confirmed that they were contacted the day before her body was discovered when someone called with concerns for Harshita’s welfare. 

Separately, a neighbour said she could hear the raised voice of a scared woman in the lead up to her disappearance.

‘I heard a commotion between a man and a woman and I heard banging around,’ she told the Daily Mirror. ‘They were arguing in a different language so I couldn’t understand what was being said.’

Police believe that Harshita was later strangled and her body driven down to London. A manhunt is currently underway for her husband, Pankaj Lamba, against whom a murder charge has been authorised by the Crown Prosecution Service in his absence.

When Harshita went to authorities in September, two months before her death, she had a Domestic Violence Protection Order put in place for 28 days. 

The order banned her husband from harassing, pestering, or intimidating her, with him being arrested if he broke the terms, but Harshita was not sufficiently safeguarded and just a few months on, he is suspected of murdering her.

It feels like every week we hear of another woman killed at the hands of a man. Each death is a tragedy – one that could have been stopped. In fact, only 4% of family members said their loved one’s killing was not preventable at all, according to charity Killed Women.  

And for charities working with women of colour and migrants, this feels especially true.

‘In our day-to-day frontline work, we see Black, minoritised and migrant victim-survivors escaping domestic abuse being dismissed by statutory agencies due to factors such as institutional racism, hostile environment for migrants, austerity-driven cuts to public services, and a failure to address barriers to accessing support’, Selma Taha, the Executive Director of Southall Black Sisters (SBS) tells Metro. 

In May 2024, PA obtained figures from the Metropolitan Police, revealing that of the 13 femicide victims recorded by the force in 2023, eight (62%) of the victims were Black, despite census data showing just 14% of women in London are Black.

This disproportionate number of women of colour killed in the UK has long been reported, but the data of women of colour and immigrants as domestic abuse victims is scarce.

What we do know from the 2021 data collected by Refuge, the largest specialist domestic abuse organisation, is that Black women are less likely to be referred by police to specialist services than white women.

Victim Support also found that while police overwhelmingly fail to act on domestic abuse reports on the whole, it is ethnic minority victims who are affected most.

In March 2014, Valerie Forde and her one-year-old daughter Jahzara were murdered by her ex-partner. He had threatened to burn down the house six weeks earlier, but when this was reported to the police, they recorded it as a threat to property rather than life.

They were both killed after receiving inadequate support.

Sistah Space – a community based non-profit organisation that helps domestic abuse victims of African heritage – has since been campaigning for ‘Valerie’s Law’ to help end domestic abuse in Black communities with specialist training for service providers. 

They are still campaigning for mandatory training for police and other governmental agencies involved in helping Black women who experience domestic abuse.

SBS echo the concerns of Sistah Space.

‘Statutory agencies continue to fail in safeguarding Black, minority and migrant women, as demonstrated in the case of Harshita Brella who was killed despite a Domestic Violence Protection Order being in place,’ Selma Taha tells Metro. ‘Banaz Mahmod was murdered in a so-called “honour” killing despite having reported to the police five times.’

In 2006, when Banaz was killed by her father, uncle and three cousins, she too reported her domestic abuse to the police – saying she had been raped and beaten multiple times by her husband. 

Her family would not agree to a divorce, but Banaz bravely left her abusive husband after two years of marriage, and went back to her family home, but was perceived to bring dishonour to her family name.

In 2005, a few weeks before her death, a bleeding and distressed Banaz tried to tell PC Angela Cornes that she feared for her life, after her father had threatened her, fed her alcohol and trapped her in their house. The officer did not believe her, going as far as calling her ‘melodramatic’ and ‘manipulative’, and wanted to charge the 20-year-old for criminal damage, after breaking a window when she escaped. 

Between December 2005 and January 2006, Banaz told the police that her family wanted her dead and had written a letter with the names of those likely to kill her.

She was murdered three weeks later.

Banaz’s sister Payzee Mahmod, who is now a campaigner for IKWRO – an organisation that supports Middle Eastern, North African and Afghan women and girls, who are at risk of all forms of ‘honour’ based abuse – had a similar experience within her child marriage.

‘The failures we experienced go further back than my sister’s death,’ Payzee tells Metro, ‘we were failed by social services, health professionals, our education system – they all knew what was happening to me and my sister.

‘We were completely invisible – and it was because of my background as a Kurdish migrant and asylum seeker. They did not understand how to navigate supporting girls who look like me and my sisters’.

‘There was a real lack of safeguarding. When the family was reported to the police for being abusive, the officers turned up at the family home, so obviously we kept quiet out of fear. We see this again and again – authorities fail to recognise a woman in harm.’

It is in this climate that SBS have urged the police to contact services such as themselves, so they can support them with the training and expertise, explaining: ‘That call for help is the first time someone’s life can be saved, and it should never be ignored.’

SBS are currently working with Talisa*, a woman who came to the UK in 2016 on a six-month visitor visa but overstayed after she became pregnant. 

Talisa’s partner exploited her vulnerable position and used her immigration status to exert control, manipulate, and subject her to violent and sexual abuse.

Even after childbirth, she was regularly raped and coerced into having more children.

To maintain her invisibility within society, her partner listed someone else as the next of kin in all forms and applications concerning their daughter, leaving the local council unaware of Talisa’s residence on the property.

When she called the police in the midst of a violent argument, Talisa’s partner told them she had overstayed her visa.

When they arrived at the house, officers arrested Talisa and put her in police custody for 24 hours. She was reported to the Home Office and her partner has since taken custody of their daughter, controlling visitation.

‘The police did not listen to the concerns of Talisa and instead locked her up. If she was experiencing abuse, they should have done something about it’,explains SBS, who are helping Talisa with her leave to remain application. 

Among all this, there is some hope. In September 2024, The Labour Party introduced ‘Raneem’s Law’ – after Raneem Oudeh, 22, was murdered along with her mother Khaola Saleem at the hands of Janbaz Tarin in 2018. 

Tarin, her abusive former partner, regularly stalked and attacked Raneem. It was said in an inquest that she felt too scared to tell police the full extent of his abuse over fears that social services would take her baby away. 

Raneem’s aunt Nour Norris said: ‘She was concerned about her baby. After having the police round, the social workers would come in. She felt they were attacking her, told her she was putting her child in danger, and that she should keep him [Tarin] out the house.

‘She wanted to cooperate with social workers but was too scared that if she told them everything, they would take her baby away.’

When the police were contacted seven times by her aunt and niece, they didn’t take any of the reports seriously. West Midlands Police admitted ‘we should have done more’, and said Raneem and Khaola’s family’s dignity throughout the inquest had ‘been humbling’. 

In September 2024, the West Midlands Police announced that they had been working alongside Noor as part of Raneem’s Law to ‘train hundreds of our officers by speaking to them about the impact that the double tragedy had on her and her family.’

Raneem’s Law is a scheme that will allow domestic abuse specialists to be embedded in 999 control rooms across the country. 

It allows specially-trained officers to capture first-hand accounts of abuse with video calls, and to also be put in touch with charities and independent specialists who will offer further support.

‘It’s a great initiative – this is something that we have been campaigning about,’ says Noor. ‘To have a specialist on the desk and all the right measures in place to help and assess them is crucially important. That’s something my sister and my niece didn’t experience. 

‘It gives a big message to perpetrators  – we are going to be out there, empowering victims and being there for them when they call us and ask for help, and we’re going to be there to stop you from doing what you’re doing early on, and not allowing it to get to a homicide.’

The scheme was rolled out on 21 February, with West Midlands Police explaining they had ‘independent domestic abuse specialists from Birmingham & Solihull Women’s Aid and Coventry Haven Women’s Aid working across 999 control rooms, offering expert advice, specialist support and working to identify missed opportunities to properly safeguard victims.’

In 2021, former Met commissioner Cressida Dick said that many Black women did not trust the police – figures showed that this trust was 6% lower in Black women than white women.

It came after police officers Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis violated the dead bodies of Black women Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry in 2020, after they were murdered by Danyal Hussein. 

The officers referred to the women as ‘dead birds’ and took pictures of their bodies, with Lewis superimposing his face onto one of them. Jaffar then later sent and showed multiple officers these images.

SBS tells Metro they would like to see more immediate change to protect victim-survivors of colour. 

‘Our 45 years of frontline experience combined with wider research have shown that services, providing community-based, intersectional, holistic and wraparound support, are regarded as a safe-haven by victim-survivors, particularly those who might otherwise be disbelieved or dismissed by authorities,’ they explains.

The problem is, they add, ‘such services are not available nationwide and face funding shortfalls’. 

‘It is imperative that the government commits to long-term, sustainable and ring-fenced funding for by-and-for services.’ 

Harshita Brella’s husband is still a fugitive and now charged with her murder. A manhunt is underway, and police are unsure as to his whereabouts.

While her family can hope that one day justice may be secured, activists in the UK are working tirelessly to make sure we never hear a story of apparent failure like Harshita’s again. 

*Names have been changed.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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