With the UK judicial system cut to breaking point, conservative religious forces are moving into a space vacated by the statewill open in London. This demands our urgent attention. For many years, I – as the co-director of Project Resist, and the former director ofhave campaigned against the growth of religious courts because we believe they are tied to a wave of religious fundamentalism targeting the rights and freedoms of women.
The use of religious laws to regulate minority women’s lives is not only discriminatory, it is immensely harmful in a context where domestic abuse and related femicides of South Asian and other minority women When many minority women seek to escape abuse, they are subjected to pressure and coercion to stay silent, and tolerate the abuse for the sake of keeping their family unit intact. Their profoundly unequal status, coupled with an unequal power distribution over knowledge of legal rights, will make it even more difficult to reject attempts at mediation, or to complain when decisions are made against their interests.