Introduction

Over the last few years, the number of sexual offences reported to the police in England and Wales has steadily grown, with consistent increases in every quarterly analysis since March 2013 (Harrison and Gill, 2018). Factors such as the secrecy that often surrounds abusive situations, the shame felt by victims, the chance of not being believed and the low likelihood of prosecution (let alone conviction) mean that few victims come forward. It is widely recognized that crime statistics significantly underestimate the scale of the problem, and this issue is compounded in South Asian communities because they have especially low rates of sexual abuse reporting.

This limited representation of the true scale of sexual abuse (because so few victims come forward) applies to all British regions and communities. However, this chapter attempts to contribute to a small literature base by focusing on the low level of sexual abuse reporting from South Asian women, and particularly on how four British police force areas currently respond to sexual abuse incidents where the victim belongs to the British South Asian community. Factoring in relevant literature suggesting that aspects of policing may still suffer from institutional racism, the chapter explores what happens when gender is also a factor in police handling of sexual abuse cases/reports. In this context, it considers why British South Asian women do not report sexual abuse to the police and considers what more can be done to encourage increased reporting in this, and other Black and racially minoritized communities.

Intersectional feminist analysis of sexual abuse in South Asian communities

Debates about intersections have a long history in the UK, and have taken place specifically in gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and cultural and diaspora studies. These debates have challenged the invisibility of Black people and the absence of theoretical/analytical frameworks that can account for how intersecting social divisions such as class and race affect different groups within particular contexts (Day and Gill, 2020). According to Brah and Phoenix (2004), a person’s multiple identities are neither discrete nor explicit, but inseparable: each identity has its own unique, related form of oppression or dominance that alters when it intersects with another identity – for example, minority women face the differing oppressions that stem from being women and from being an ethnic minority.