Women and cultural diversity:A digest of cases

This digest is a part of a research project undertaken at the LSE Gender Institute and supported by the Nuffield Foundation. It contains summaries of some of the key cases in which gender and culture have coincided in the British courts, mainly since the 1970s, but including some that date back to the Nineteenth Century. The research project considered to what extent cultural and/or ethnic diversity is recognised in public policy and legal judgements, and whether the kind of recognition currently given to cultural diversity helps or hinders the equal treatment of women. This digest arose out of our work. It does not claim to be a comprehensive digest of all relevant cases, and these are not detailed summaries, as any researcher looking at a particular case in detail will need to have access to the original transcript or report. We hope, however, that it will provide useful information for others working in this field. 

The work on the digest was carried out by Moira Dustin, Oonagh Reitman and Anne Phillips. 

We would like to thank the CIMEL-INTERIGHTS Project on Strategies to Address 'Crimes of Honour' at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants(JCWI), London, for providing some of the case summaries included here. 

The digest was partly inspired by CIMEL's 'honour crimes' bibliography, which can be accessed at http://www.soas.ac.uk/honourcrimes/Links.htm

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Below are some notes about the layout of this digest

Gender Institute
January 2004

Notes on fields:
Year: The year of judgment, or the date the case was recorded.
Case: This field identifies the case by the names of the parties concerned, eg Shah v Shah.
Reference: This is the citation or any other reference relating to the case for purposes of identification. 
Court: The court where the case was heard. Scottish cases are all identified as Outer House (Scotland).
Judge: The surnames of the judge(s) where known.
Type of case: We have used the following categories - abduction, annulment, asylum, custody, divorce, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, 'honour' crime, immigration, marriage recognition, murder or manslaughter, polygamy or potential polygamy, rape and unlawful intercourse, other. NB 'honour' crime is used to describe a case defined as such by the judge(s) or in media reports of the case. 
Summary: This is our summary of the facts of the case, including the outcome, and with a comment by the researchers in some instances.
Related cases: This field is only used if there is another summary for the same case at a different stage of the legal process.