Sara Sharif's Mixed Race was a Predictor of her Abuse

ANNOUNCEMENT: Soon I’ll be doing another AMA. Reply to my Substack note with your questions:

---

There were cries of “evil” from the Old Bailey’s public gallery on Tuesday 17th December when Pakistani mini-cab driver Urfan Sharif (42) and his Pakistani wife Beinash Batool (29) were sentenced, having been found guilty of long-term torturing and then murdering Sharif’s ten-year-old daughter Sara. The little girl, whose mother, Olga Domin, was Polish, was found to have over 70 fresh injuries including to her ribs, shoulders, and fingers, 11 fractures to her spine, a puncture wound to the head, traumatic brain injury, a 2 to 6 week-old festering burn wound on her buttocks due to the application of an iron, burns caused by hot water being poured over her ankles, restraint injuries, bruises occasioned by blunt objects and human bite marks on her inner thigh from Batool.

Having killed Sara through cumulative abuse, the couple (and the wife’s student brother who lived with them) fled to Pakistan. From Pakistan, Sharif rang the UK police and claimed he “legally punished” Sara, but “beat her up too much,” causing her to die. Sara’s body was duly discovered at their flat by a policeman on 10th August 2023, the day after they left the country.

An international manhunt ensued in Pakistan; so, under pressure from their family in Pakistan, the trio returned to Gatwick Airport and were immediately arrested. They pleaded “Not Guilty” at the trial, with the father blaming his wife, but he eventually broke down under cross-examination and admitted everything. Sharif was sentenced to 40 years, the wife (who took part in the abuse ) to 33 years, and the uncle to 16 years, as he clearly looked on and did nothing to protect Sara.

Subsequent debate has focused on the failure of the legal system, which gave Sara’s father full custody despite having been told of his violence to his other children, and of the social services, who failed to act, possibly fearing accusations of “racism.” The case was assigned to a newly qualified social worker, but all the signs were there that something was seriously wrong: Sara would be sent to school wearing makeup to cover her bruises, telling a neighbour that she fell off her bike. Then she was in school wearing a hijab (to cover the abuse marks) and, finally, in April 2023, they decided to “home school her;” something which is incredibly rare in the UK, where she spent much of her time tied up. Sara was severely abused from the age of 8 and would sometimes be hooded while beaten.

As early as 2010, a year after they married, Olga Domin reported fleeing domestic violence and that Sharif had hit Sara’s half-brother from a previous relationship. She gave birth to a son by Sharif in 2010 and to Sara in 2013. In 2014, Sharif married Batool in Pakistan, and he and Domin divorced in 2015. Until 2019, Sharif had only social worker-supervised access to his children, due to concerns about his violence. Other Polish women, whom he seemingly pursued so he could marry one and remain in the UK indefinitely due to EU arrangements, alleged violence and even, in 2007, holding them captive. Despite all this, Sharif obtained full custody of his children. Any sensible judge would have put them into care. Hence, newspapers are now forbidden from reporting the name of the incompetent judge involved, to protect them from reprisals at the hands of the furious public.

However, it seems to me that a fundamental fact of what the trial judge called almost inconceivably cruel treatment is being overlooked. Not only did Sara have a step-parent who had her own children, a step-parent being 40 times more likely to abuse a child than its biological parent, but Sara was mixed race. This fact potentially helps to explain significant elements of what happened to her.

Mixed race children, for a number of sociological reasons such as greater maternal alcoholism, are at higher risk of being abused by their parents, as noted in the paper “Are Black/White Biracial Children at Higher Risk?” In addition, there is abundant evidence that we are motivated by genetic similarity, summarised in J. Philippe Rushton’s study “Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory.” All else being equal, we are kinder to people the more genetically similar they are to us. Studies within families have shown that people are closer to siblings, for example, that are slightly more genetically similar to them than to other siblings; with the 50% relatedness rate only being an average, due to the fact that the parents themselves select for genetic similarity in their partners.

Clearly, if you have a mixed race child, you are less genetically similar to it than you are to a child of your own race. Frank Salter has shown in On Genetic Interests that if the world is divided between English and Danes then two random English people are the equivalent of 7th cousins. If it’s between Aborigines and Pygmies then two random Aborigines are full-siblings, such is the genetic distance. The distance between English and Bantu is such that if an Englishman had a child with a Bantu woman he would only be as related to it as he would be to a random English child. A likely heavily inbred Pakistani father would not be quite so genetically distant from his child, but there would clearly be greater genetic distance than if the child was fully Pakistani. This would predict lower levels of altruism towards the child.

But we must further ask, “What kind of people contract mixed race relationships?” The answer, according to the study “Predictors of Engaging in Interracial Dating,” is people who are higher in risk-taking. In other words, they are “fast Life History strategists;” adapted to an unstable yet easy ecology in which they “live fast, die young.” In this context, you will focus on copulation with as many fit people as possible and you will invest little in a given child, as they could be wiped out at any moment. You will be interested in the partner’s fitness (youth and beauty in females) over all other considerations. After all, there is no need to bond with them or the child, as genetic similarity would allow. Further, you may as well take the risk of someone genetically dissimilar because they could carry some useful gene and, anyway, you’re adapted to enjoy risk, as you could be suddenly killed so you may as well take risks.

As the ecology becomes harsh and stable, you must adapt to it or perish. You must nurture your offspring or they could all die, and you must become strongly adapted to the specific ecology or you will die. If you select for genetic similarity in your partner, you ensure that the offspring are adapted to the ecology, and you will nurture them more because they are genetically similar to you. You will reduce your offspring number in order to allow for this nurture, thus selecting similarity to compensate for the loss of genetic interests involved in having fewer children. You will be risk-averse, as deviating from your narrow niche will likely mean death. Indeed, you will be averse to foreigners, as they may carry harmful pathogens. A nurturing ecology selects for mental stability and pro-social personality. The opposite selects for the kind of psychopath who would marry someone he doesn’t love in order to remain in the UK.

So we would predict that those who pursue mixed race relationships will be relatively more antisocial and violent. This is what we find with both of Sara’s parents.

Her Polish mother, Olga Domin (according to the father who claimed Sara had told him this) pinched Sara, punched her, threatened to burn her with lighters, and threatened to drown her in the bath. Her older brother also reported abuse by his mother. This is why Sara and her brother were removed from the mother and placed with the father, with the mother only being allowed supervised access, with a social worker present. The mother admitted smacking Sara’s bottom, which is legal in England (as long as it is not too severe) though frowned upon, and she admitted finding Sara “hard to manage.” She’d also been cautioned by the police for biting Sara’s half-brother in 2014.

So, we have two violent and anti-social parents. Considering that the genetic component of personality is about 50%, then we would expect them to produce a difficult child; a child towards whom they would be very unsympathetic (a) due to being anti-social and mentally unstable and (b) due to it being strongly genetically dissimilar from them. Mixed race adolescents, according to a literature review in the interracial dating study, are elevated in mental illness, drug use, and violent behaviour. Sara seemed to exemplify related traits. The judge described her as “a brave, feisty, and spirited child. She was not submissive, as you wanted her to be. She stood up to you.” Two days before her father beat her with a pole for “pretending” to be ill (the final act of abuse that killed her), she was videoed happily dancing at home. It seems that it was later day that she received the brain trauma which made her feel ill on the day of her death.

Her full brother was likely less “feisty,” less typical of mixed race children, and so subject to less abuse; though both he and his half-brother were physically abused as already noted. But Sara as the judge summarised, was, “tied up and was even hooded, by a grotesque combination of parcel tape, rope, and a plastic bag. She was not even allowed to go to the toilet, but was put in pull-up nappies, and was left to wallow in her own urine and faeces. The torture got worse. She was burned with an iron and boiling water was poured on her ankles.”

The family are also testimony to the consequences of likely inbreeding, with the step-mother having children with Sharif who had serious health problems. But, as with so many things, evolutionary psychology – the genetics of the mind - allows us to parsimoniously understand the tragic life of Sara Sharif, though I stress that I am making no moral proscriptions with regard to mixed race relationships, just reporting the facts and implications. As I have discussed in The Past is a Future Country, genetic changes also seem to explain, in part, why these child-torturing Pakistanis and this child-abusing Pole are in the UK in the first place, and why we don’t hang Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool for what they did to this poor little girl.

---

For more based-science analysis of society and politics, become a subscriber at JollyHeretic.com!

---

Did you miss the last Dutton’s Digest? Click below:

Only Fans Brit Who Banged 100 Men in One Day is Kind of Our Fault