The men who persecuted Deeyah in Norway and Britain were every bit as prejudiced and violent as neo-Nazis, but as it happens, they rallied under the banner of radical Islam rather than the swastika. A tiny difference, you might think. A mere trifle. But that tiny difference made all the difference in the world. No one came to Deeyah's defence. Not liberal-left or compassionate conservative politicians. Not the BBC or liberal press. Not Amnesty International or the "concerned" artists who take up so many leftish causes. No one cared. To defend an Asian woman from unprovoked attacks by Asian men was to their warped minds a racist or Islamophobic act. Unprotected and unnoticed, Deeyah slunk off to live in an anonymous suburb of Atlanta, and begin the long task of pulling herself together.  

After the Jimmy Savile scandal, the British have looked back on the 1970s with self-satisfaction. How could our predecessors have been so indifferent to abuse back then, they ask. How shocking that we once ignored suffering and pretended that it did not exist. Couldn't happen today, of course. No, no, no, we are a better and kinder people. Not when it comes to women and children with brown rather than white skin, we aren't. When a 15-year-old white schoolgirl runs off to France with a teacher, the story leads the news. When the parents of a Pakistani girl pull their daughter from class and force her to marry an old man from the other side of the world—that is, when they organise her abduction and rape—polite society stays quiet. The genital mutilation of girls is a criminal offence in Britain, which sounds like an advance. The only trouble is that the police and Crown Prosecution Service will not enforce the law, and doctors and social workers will not expose the abuse.

Deeyah retreated to her asylum in Atlanta. If you are a woman, she was to write later, you "cannot be who you are, you cannot express your needs, hopes and opinions as an individual if they are in conflict with the greater good and reputation of the family, the community, the collective." Deeyah did not collapse under the pressure of collective violence. Rather magnificently, she stopped wanting to be a celebrity, and decided to step up a gear and become a feminist activist instead. Banaz: An Honour Killing is the first result of her change of course. Her film (originally titled Banaz: A Love Story) tells the story of Banaz Mahmod, the daughter of Kurdish parents, who lived in Mitcham, South London. They married her when she was 17 to a Kurdish man, then aged 28, whom she barely knew. Her husband assaulted her all the time. "When he raped me it was like I was his shoe that he could wear whenever he wanted to," she explained. "I didn't know if this was normal in my culture, or here. I was 17."

Banaz ran away, and began to see Rahmat Sulemani, a young friend. The love between the two appalled her family. Her father, uncle and two cousins arranged and executed her murder.