Banaz's "crime" was to have fled a brutal, loveless arranged marriage and fall in love with another Kurdish man that her family disapproved of. Her father and uncle ordered her murder and last year they and a family friend were convicted of her killing. Two other people thought to have carried out the murder fled to Iraqi Kurdistan where, I have been told by one Kurdish source, they are living a carefree existence in their ancestral villages.

All honour killings are horrendous but what made Banaz's case stand out was the fact that she had repeatedly alerted the authorities to her plight.

Banaz even handed in a list of those in the family she believed were trying to kill her and on one occasion (New Year's Eve 2005) found in a south London cafe near her home covered in blood after jumping out of a window to escape her father who had tried to ply her with alcohol and strangle her.

PC Angela Cornes, one of officers who went to that incident, admitted in court that she dismissed Banaz as being a melodramatic New Year's reveller, rather than the terrified potential murder victim that she actually was.

Most of the time police would be lucky to have a potential victim pluck up the courage to talk to them just the once, let alone four times.

Refuge workers often tell me that the vast majority of victims they receive never went to the police because the perception is that they will only act once something has actually happened. In Banaz's case even attempted murder wasn't enough for them to act, she had to be actually murdered before a full investigation was launched.

I can think of at least five victims of honour violence who I've spoken to in the past year and every one of them told me they either didn't trust the police enough to go to them in the first place or when they did they were deeply unimpressed with how their cases were handled and only escaped the danger they were in thanks to independently run refuges.

That's not to say that police always do a bad job - every year they save thousands of victims in danger of violence. The irony is that both the Metropolitan Police and West Midlands Police, the two forces implicated in today's IPCC investigation, have better track records than most when it comes to honour violence and have many trained specialists with experience in such crimes.

Police forces around the country are now finally waking up to the cultural peculiarities of honour violence - which incidentally is not just carried out by Muslim communities and doesn't just happen to women - and are more aware than ever that victims often need to be protected from the very people who are supposed to love and protect them.

But it certainly isn't going to send out a very positive message to anyone currently living in fear of honour violence and thinking of going to the police that two years ago a woman once did that FOUR times and still ended up dead.