Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry

[ArabellaScott]

bylinetimes.com/2021/03/22/uncomfortable-conversations-need-to-be-had-about-why-murder-of-two-black-sisters-hardly-made-the-news-says-mp/

Article including quotes from Dawn Butler.

Noting that the man accused of killing the sisters is due a trial in June. Please be mindful if commenting that the case is pending.

This was a horribly upsetting crime, but I remember at the time how fast it seemed to slip out of the news.

Hard topics to discuss sensitively, but I thought it might be a relevant article.

It depresses me that (and I've not read this thread but others) so many posters get defensive instead of listening and thinking.

I think that was Arabella's point of starting the thread, to try to discuss reasonably without insults and finger-pointing, so hopefully this thread will avoid that.

I think a lot of it is harder to navigate because of our emotional responses. They are somewhat unavoidable, and sometimes a bit unpredictable, but we need to be aware of them.

Sometimes when reading news stories/discussing them we feel empathy, sometimes sympathy, sometimes denial, rage, anxiety, it might stir up memories/PTSD, or trigger fear for our own children, as well as knee-jerk objections to questioning our own prejudices or blind spots.

I can see all those responses in myself when reading about these cases.

It's hard work. This is the thing about feminism that I'm learning more as I get older. It's not all shiny slogans and empowerment. A lot of it is hard, difficult work that requires courage and humility and patience.

I hope that it is worth it and it might lead to ways to help all women.

May I just pop in to mention the sad case of Bennylyn Burke and her poor daughter. Their case has provoked barely a ripple of media attention.

A second child, a baby, was found and is being looked after,
Notable. I hadn't realised until quite recently. That poor baby, losing mummy and sister, heartbreaking.

Nicole and Bibaa, the police response was woeful and the shocking photo revelations remain disgusting.

I think it was Bennylyn's 7 year old daughter that was found?

I did wonder if sometimes these cases are kept out of the spotlight deliberately to try and protect children, as in this case, the last thing you would want is lots of publicity or for a child to find it all years later?

• and there is the point of upcoming trials to consider, also.

Yes good point Arabella.

I think that might be true - the media seem to have been very careful about how they reported it so far so the Police might have asked for that.

Just going back to the disappearance of Nicole and Bibaa as reported to the police, no action was taken. Why? Two women disappear from park?

From google first news paper report on the tuesday was (and I didn't read this at the time) a woman said she had seen the bodies and thought it was just 2 women sleeping! Which sort of emphasises no wide spread publicity because her reaction might have been different if it had made news headlines.

It was only on the tuesday that the msm media started reporting it, and in a very low key way - see this from Evening Standard which is a London specific paper. www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/nicole-smallman-bibaa-henry-dead-fryent-country-park-wembley-a4463841.html

It was only when a local paper in Southend where their mother had been an archdeacon that her "status" became part of the story. And only by the end of June that national papers"gave her a voice" www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/nicole-smallman-bibaa-henry-sisters-murdered-wembley-a9589106.html ie 3 weeks later.

And as i said upthread there were attempts to get people to take notice as i saw some of the messages on facebook.

And we all know that blonde blue eyed females get more press coverage. Even when it is about children. Just look at the response to Maddy going mising.

Murders of men also tend to get far less attention. 3 men killed in a park last year, no vigil that I'm aware of and only basic coverage in the media.

I felt quite conflicted about the media attention on Sarah Everard, on the one hand it was good and has raised a lot of awareness. But I felt angry too - why isn't there a big fuss every time a woman is murdered? And yes, my first thought was there's no way there would have been that coverage for a black woman, and probably not for a white woman who was poor, or old, or unattractive. And that's an uncomfortable reflection on who is valued in our society, and who is not.

This case will always stay with me I think. Not only the injustice that they were murdered but how utterly they and their family were let down and betrayed by the police afterwards - generally Indifference and specifically the kind of moral standards you’d expect from psychopaths regarding the photographs.

I think that the papers do only focus on the murders where it is consider to be "unusual" - ie they do not report the 2 women who die every week from domestic violence.

And there is always an implication that men who are murdered are somehow part of the violence that caused their deaths.

It was one of the things that a march organised by mothers of young Black boys stabbed to death was trying to get attention for. ie what was happening on the streets that a young boy going to the corner shop could end up dead.

By some terrible irony their march had to be diverted down a less public group because Extinction Rebellion had colonised the cenrtal areas for their staycation selfie oooooooh I might get arrested "demo".

It was really up setting. No follow up by papers. Nothing.

I really despise XR these days. Sorry. As you were.

Being discussed On R4 now.

Terrible. There hasn’t been much reported about the man charged has there? I wonder why.

This R4 interview is extremely sobering.

They deserved better.

Claiming racism isn't happening, that it's classism, this is the new denial of racism. It is appropriating what happens to others as something which could happen to you and denying the lived experience of those actually subjected to racism.

This wasn't classism. The mother was retired Archdeacon of Southend, Wilhelmina Smallman, who was also the first female archdeacon from a BAME background until her retirement 5 years ago. Her elder daughter, Bibaa Henry, 46, was a senior social worker and her younger daughter, Nicole Smallman, 27 was a graduate of the University of Westminster.

They went missing at the end of a small family birthday party held at a popular and busy London Park.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/10/london-sisters-were-daughters-of-c-of-es-first-female-bame-archdeacon

This wasn't classism.

This wasn't classism.

Indeed.

But part of the problem is that the majority population automatically label every single non-white person in the country as working class. (Not that such a label should negate empathy, of course.) It's virtually impossible for them to conceptualise any other place in society for black people.

@PursuingProxemicExactitude

This wasn't classism.

Indeed.

But part of the problem is that the majority population automatically label every single non-white person in the country as working class. (Not that such a label should negate empathy, of course.) It's virtually impossible for them to conceptualise any other place in society for black people.

Exactly.

Front page of the BBC this morning

www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-56450969

Mina Smallman

That poor woman. I can't even begin to imagine what she is going through. She is telling us that the reason her daughters' disappearance was treated so casually by the police is because of racism. Anyone who is telling her that that's not the case is as bad and probably worse than the men who tell women that street harassment is a compliment and not meant to intimidate.

I wish I could do something to help her. I can't iimagine what she's going through, either.

Mina Smallman