Saman Abbas
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
(Edgar Lee Masters)
Her name was Saman Abbas. When I first wrote about her, in 2021, she was officially missing: an eighteen-year-old girl of Pakistani origin who had disappeared from Novellara after refusing to marry a cousin chosen by her family. Her parents had abruptly returned to Pakistan, other relatives had vanished, and security footage showed members of the family walking into the fields carrying shovels and a large plastic bag. There was still room, then, for the ritual language of uncertainty.
There is none now. Saman had returned home from a shelter because her parents had promised not to harm her. They killed her, buried her near the farmhouse where her father worked and fled. Her body was found eighteen months later. In July 2026, Italy’s Court of Cassation made the convictions final: life imprisonment for her parents and two cousins, twenty-two years for her uncle. The entire family had participated, either in the murder or in the machinery surrounding it. Saman was not killed in an explosion of rage. She was eliminated after collective deliberation because she had attempted to withdraw her body and her future from family ownership. The final ruling confirmed that the crime was a family enterprise. Her story has acquired a judicial ending, but not a political one. Hina Saleem had already been murdered near Brescia in 2006 because she wanted to live as the Italian woman she had become. Sana Cheema, an Italian citizen raised in Brescia, was taken to Pakistan in 2018 and strangled after rejecting the husband selected for her. Farah, a nineteen-year-old student from Verona, was lured to Pakistan with the pretext of attending her brother’s wedding, deprived of her passport and telephone and forced to abort the child she was expecting from her Italian boyfriend. She managed to send a WhatsApp message to her school friends and was eventually rescued by Pakistani police and brought back to Italy. She survived, but only after the family had decided which child she was permitted to have. The script has changed remarkably little. The daughter studies in Italy, builds friendships, falls in love, learns that adulthood should include the right to choose whom to marry and whether to have children. Her family discovers that integration has worked and treats the result as a catastrophe. A wedding, a sick grandmother or a funeral is invented in Pakistan or Bangladesh; the girl is taken abroad, isolated, stripped of her documents and delivered to the authority of relatives and a husband chosen for her. The violence begins in Italy and is completed elsewhere, using distance, family networks and jurisdictional borders as weapons. These are not simply domestic crimes. They are transnational patriarchal crimes. Sometimes, however, no aeroplane is necessary. In June 2026, a court in Reggio Emilia sentenced a Pakistani couple to two years and fifteen days for abusing their twenty-two-year-old daughter and attempting to force her into marriage. She had been locked in a basement, deprived of her telephone, beaten with her face pressed against the floor and forced to abort after becoming pregnant by a boyfriend her parents did not approve of. The final objective was to send her to Pakistan and marry her to a cousin. She survived because she eventually went to the Carabinieri. The sentence is almost grotesquely modest when placed beside the catalogue of violence, but the case matters because it shows that the mechanism exposed by Saman’s murder remains intact. This time the victim escaped before the family could finish the story for her. Nor is this exclusively a Pakistani phenomenon. In Rimini, the parents of a young woman of Bangladeshi origin were arrested in 2025 after allegedly taking her to Bangladesh on the pretext of visiting an ill relative, forcing her to marry an older man and administering drugs intended both to subdue her and help produce a pregnancy. A child would have become another lock on the door, binding her permanently to the imposed husband and the country from which she was trying to escape. She was saved because people in Italy noticed that she had not returned. Italy now possesses the legal instruments it conspicuously lacked in the past. The 2019 Codice Rosso introduced Article 558-bis of the Criminal Code, punishing coercion or inducement into marriage and allowing prosecution even when part of the offence is committed abroad. Article 572 covers the familiar architecture of family abuse: beatings, confinement, confiscation of telephones, interruption of schooling and systematic intimidation. Laws matter. They establish that a forced marriage is not an unfortunate cultural misunderstanding and that a family home does not constitute an extraterritorial enclave.
Yet laws intervene only after someone sees, listens and believes. These girls are often reluctant to report their families because reporting does not mean losing only abusive parents. It may mean losing siblings, relatives, language, community and the entire social world in which they were raised. They know they will be called traitors long before their abusers are called criminals. Schools, teachers, classmates, doctors and social workers are therefore not peripheral figures: they are often the only border guards between a young woman and disappearance.
This is where the Italian cases meet, despite the obvious differences in the crimes, Britain’s grooming-gang scandal. The connection is not that forced marriage, so-called honour killing and organised sexual exploitation are identical phenomena. They are not. It lies in the institutional response. For years, authorities in several British towns failed to confront networks of men, many of Pakistani heritage, who sexually exploited vulnerable girls. Victims were disbelieved or treated as troublesome, while officials worried that discussing the social and ethnic profile of some offenders would inflame racial tensions. The 2025 Casey audit found clear over-representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage suspects in several local datasets and concluded that ethnicity had too often been ignored or not even recorded. Fear of appearing racist became more important than the duty to protect children. The British government eventually acknowledged that this institutional evasiveness had denied victims justice. The lesson is not that an entire community should be placed in the dock. Collective ethnic guilt is both morally repellent and analytically useless. The lesson is that culture cannot be invoked only when it produces food festivals and colourful clothes, then declared irrelevant when it helps organise coercion, silence and impunity. Acknowledging a specific patriarchal structure does not criminalise all Pakistanis, just as prosecuting the Mafia does not constitute an accusation against all Italians. Refusing to name a structure merely leaves its victims alone inside it. Europe has spent years confusing respect for individuals with deference to community power. But the girl refusing a cousin selected in Pakistan is also part of that community. So is the child dismissed by British police as unreliable. Multiculturalism worthy of the name protects them first; it does not outsource their rights to fathers, brothers, husbands, clerics or self-appointed community representatives. Saman wanted black nail polish, ripped jeans, music, love and the right to decide what happened to her own life. Nothing particularly Western, decadent or revolutionary: merely the ordinary privileges enjoyed by those whose freedom is never presented as an insult to their family. The law has finally named her killers. It must now learn to recognise the pattern before another girl is added to this Pakistani Spoon River.
