Life must be very frightening for Maryam, whose subjective experience, so much of the time, is that she’s being held against her will and kept away from her own home.

Life is obviously also very hard for the rest of the family, but particular for Maryam’s daughter-in-law, Amina, who seems to have given up most of her time to caring for an elderly woman who pays her back with abuse and violence.

The contribution of the Dudleys next door (Case G: Dudley/Harris family) cannot help with this. It’s an additional stressor in what is already a very stressful situation. (What the Dudleys gain from it is another question.) It may seem small in comparison with the rest of the what the family are dealing with, but it’s worth bearing in mind that, if the one problem that the Begum/Hussein family were having to dealing with was hostility and suspicion from their next door neighbours, this alone would be a hard thing to have to deal with.

The challenges of coping with Maryam are making it harder for the family to deal with other things. Both Monty and Kabir have made the always difficult step of choosing to step outside of what their parents would have expected and hoped for them. Monty has only found it possible to deal with this by cutting himself off from the family, while Kabir has dealt with it by concealing from the family (a) that he is gay and (b) the fact that he has a new partner. Such situations do not only occur in Muslim families, of course, but may be particularly difficult in situations where parents subscribe to a fairly rigid value system which is at odds with the values of much of the world around them. And particularly difficult too in the families of immigrants where the younger generation is trying to find a way of negotiating an identity for themselves that will allow them to participate in the wider culture, while still retaining their links with the culture of their parents and grandparents.