Urfan Sharif was able to convince the authorities his family was at no risk, says Fleet Street Fox. If we’d given his children the tools to escape, Sara might still be alive
Fifteen times, adults believed Urfan Sharif. They disbelieved his wife, they said there wasn’t enough evidence, they decided not to prosecute.
The body of his daughter Sara was found with so many injuries it is not known which one killed her. Perhaps it was being hit with a cricket bat; perhaps it was the haemmorrhages, or the broken bones.
And likewise, there were so many adults who failed to stop it that when the long-winded review announced in the wake of his conviction for murder comes in, it won’t be obvious who, if anyone, could be held responsible. It’s always the system that fails, while the adults who built and maintain it struggle to understand how they could have done any better.
But with this crime there is one person whose rights were taken away by every adult they met. Sara was the last person whose opinion anybody asked.
Some people will say hers was a murder caused by a migrant of a medieval religion, who should never have been in Britain. Yet Christians also abuse children, and Britain has plenty of homegrown child murderers. Had Sharif stayed in Pakistan, we’d still have seen the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, Alfie Steele, Baby P, Jacob Crouch, Finley Boden…
Sara was murdered because, when social workers saw her flinch at her father, and refuge staff heard her tell how her mother was beaten, she wasn’t believed. Because, when her father videoed her saying it was her mother who’d been abusive, they believed it all too readily. Sharif pressured his children to protect himself, and the adults who spend all day dealing with duplicitous grown-ups were unable to spot he was one of them.
It could all have been different, if in the few years Sara was allowed to school she’d been taught what gaslighting was. If there had been lessons about coercion, and some clear instructions about what to do, who to call, and how to get help, if anything bad happens at home.
That is where abuse happens, in white, non-white, British and immigrant households. It is children who witness or are victims to all of it. And while adults are quick to doubt themselves when they sense something’s off, a child acts instinctively. If Sara had thought she’d be heard, if she had known it was a crime, she might have been able to raise the alarm, for herself and her siblings. Instead, she was abandoned by the state.
It should not be the responsibility of a child to save their own life; yet hundreds of cases like Sara’s prove that the grown-ups can’t be relied upon. They’re either gullible, powerless, overworked, or find the system won’t act in time, if at all.
In primary schools, we teach our children in an age-appropriate way that parts of their body are off-limits to others, that you shouldn’t be unkind to someone because of the colour of their hair or skin. But what if we were braver, and told them that one child a week is murdered by a parent because the grown-ups let them down? What if we said, look, if this happens to you or someone you know, you have a right to help. There is a way out, there can be safety, and here’s how you get there.
What if we made all children feel empowered? Not mollycoddled or blithely ignorant, but genuinely in possession of the tools to know, even at a young age, that violence is different to discipline, that belittling and humiliation is different to a telling-off, and that there is a person who can help: someone guaranteed, at all times, to put their needs first.
Pussyfooting around domestic abuse has turned it into an epidemic. The right of a child not to be beaten to death by a cricket bat always seems like a footnote. At one point Sara was asked who she’d like to live with, and she said her dad, and no-one said to her “would you like to read his file first?”
No-one said to Sara she had a right to live differently. That she had a right to a safe home, caring parents, education, and justice for anyone who had hurt her. It’s easy for adults to say what should fix a complicated thing they’ve no experience of, but I suspect that if we could ask Sara what would have helped, she would probably say “a friend”. And we could do that, for every abused adult and child, very simply. We could start by changing the job title from ‘social worker’, which sounds like someone slogging their way through sewage and hoping to find a canapè, to ‘ENTER NAME HERE’s Best Friend’.
When you doubt your own sanity, your own home is a place of fear, and you’re made to feel like the secret you’re keeping could break the whole world open, the only thing that helps is someone who is indisputably on your side. And that is something which all of Britain’s grown-ups keep failing to be for all the children like Sara – past, present, and future.
