HONOR KILLING

An honor killing is a murder, nearly exclusively of a woman, who has been perceived as having brought dishonor to her family. Such killings are typically perpetrated by the victim's own relatives and/or community and unlike a crime of passion or rage-induced killing, it is usually planned in advance.

In societies and cultures where they occur, such killings are often regarded as a "private matter" for the affected family alone, and courts rarely become involved or prosecute the perpetrators.

The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the annual worldwide total of honor-killing victims may be as high as 5,000 women.

Definitions

Human Rights Watch defines "honor killings" as follows:

Honor crimes are acts of violence, usually murder, committed by male family members against female family members, who are held to have brought dishonor upon the family. A woman can be targeted by (individuals within) her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce — even from an abusive husband — or (allegedly) committing adultery. The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that "dishonors" her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life.

For example, honor killings can sometimes target women who choose boyfriends, lovers or spouses outside of their family's ethnic and/or religious community. Women enabled to assert their own preferences and goals are felt as an unbearable disruption of men's planned economic and political networks, where women are normatively presumed to be manipulable tools of that networking.

Similarly, in certain cultures a raped single woman will garner no bride price if she marries; thus she will be regarded as a worthless burden on the family, which can be a death sentence. It is not that such women do not generate value or are not valuable members of the family; but rather the key to honor killing is that from the authoritarian, patriarchal vantage point, "deviant" women appear as intolerable costs; their inherent worth and contributions are discounted.

Some women who bridge social divides, publicly engage other communities, or adopt some of the customs or the religion of an outside group may thus also be attacked. In countries that receive immigration, some otherwise-low status immigrant men and boys have asserted their dominant patriarchal status by inflicting honor killings on women family members who have participated in public life, for example in feminist and integration politics. Women in the family can support the honor killing of one of their own, when they agree that the family is the property and asset of men and boys.

There is some evidence that homosexuality can also be grounds for honor killing by relatives. Several cases have been suspected but not confirmed. There is a documented case of a gay Jordanian man who was shot (but not fatally) by his brother.

Many hold the practice of honor killing to be self-contradictory, since it is sometimes justified, by its participants or supporters, as an attempt to uphold the morals of a religion or a code, which at the same time generally forbids killing as morally wrong.

Honor suicides

Honor suicides occur when, in an effort to avoid legal penalties for killing, a woman is ordered or pressured into killing herself. This phenomenon appears to be a relatively recent development. A special envoy for the United Nations named Yakin Erturk, who was sent to Turkey to investigate suspicious suicides amongst Kurdish girls, was quoted by The New York Times as saying that some suicides appeared in Kurdish-inhabited regions of Turkey to be "honor killings disguised as a suicide or an accident."

The historic practice of sati, or widow-burning, in parts of India and south Asia can be considered a form of honor suicide in those instances when (at least theoretically) the act is voluntary, with a deceased man's widow immolating herself on his funeral pyre as an act of pious devotion and to preserve her and her family's honor. The justifications for sati, as well as its actual prevalence and acceptance, are subject to much historical and religious debate, however. Ever since the British ruled India, sati has been banned and is now considered murder.

Locations

As of 2004, honor killings have occurred at the hands of individuals within parts of various countries, such as Albania, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel (within the Arab, Druze and Bedouin communities), Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, Sweden, Turkey, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States. According to the UN:

"The report of the Special Rapporteur ... concerning cultural practices in the family that are violent towards women (E/CN.4/2002/83), indicated that honour killings had been reported in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey, Yemen, and other Mediterranean and Gulf countries, and that they had also taken place in such countries as France, Germany and the United Kingdom within migrant communities."

In December 2005, Nazir Afzal, Director, West London, of Britain's Crown Prosecution Service, stated that the United Kingdom has seen "at least a dozen honor killings" between 2004 and 2005. Given the geopolitical politics dominant today, the practice of honor killing is associated in the West with certain Muslim cultures and the peoples influenced by those cultures. Honor killings are more common among poor rural communities than urban ones. Christians living within parts of Africa and the Near East, such as sections of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, sometimes carry out the crime, as well as some men from some Muslim communities. While violence and discrimination against women is unfortunately widespread across the globe, it is well established that social inequality is a precipatory factor. There is a strong positive correlation between women's social power and a baseline of development, associated with access to basic resources, health care, and human capital, such as literacy.

Many cases of honor killings have been reported in Pakistan. During the year 2002 in Pakistan about four hundred people (men & women) were killed in the name of (Karo-Kari) in Sindh Out of 382 (245 women, 137 men). The phenomenon of the killing in the name of honor has direct relevance to the illiteracy rate, as these killings are more common in the areas where the literacy rate is lower. According to a report issued by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Jacobabad District ranked first in terms of murder in the name of Karo Kari (66 women, 25 men). Jacobabad district has a literacy rate of 23.66, the least literate district of Sindh after Tharparkar District, and Thatta District. After Jacobabad, the Ghotki District witnessed the highest number of murders in the name of Karo Kari (13 men, 54 women). After Ghotki, Larkana is the district with the next highest murder rate in the name of Karo Kari (24 men, 38 women). Larkana as well, has a low literacy rate of 34.95. This is lower than even Naushahro Feroze District, Dadu District, and Khairpur District, having 39.14, 35.56 and 35.50 percent literacy rates respectively. These districts of the upper Sindh have low literacy rates but high feudal influence in every walk of life. Jacobabad, Ghotki and Larkana are those districts of Sindh where not only the illiterate ones, but tribal chieftains are also in large number. According to a report released by the HRCP, the cases of Karo Kari are mostly settled at jirgas, the private and parallel judicial system of Chieftains. However, districts of lower parts of Sindh like Tharparkar, Badin, and Thatta experience nominal occurrences of honor killings because they have lower amount of feudal influence there.

In 1997 Fadime Sahindal’s father Rahmi Sahindal and her little brother Masud threatened to execute her. Having grown up in Sweden, Fadime was not interested in entering into a forced marriage with a Kurdish man in Turkey. Instead Fadime pursued a university degree. She met and fell in love with a young Swedish man, whose parents’ overtures to Fadime's parents on the couple’s behalf were harshly rejected. Rahmi and Masud Sahindal would only refer to Fadime spitefully as “the whore”. Fadime, a sociologist and activist, was a public figure, bringing to light in Sweden the problems refugee families faced, especially refugee women. Pleading for humanitarian, not authoritarian, social intervention, Sahindal repeatedly explained, “I love my father. He understands no better way of treating me.” Before she was to embark on a scholarly trip to Africa in 2001, Fadime arranged to secretly meet her sister and mother at her sister’s apartment in Uppsala. Her father was advised. He ambushed Fadime at her departure visit, and shot her dead. Fadime’s parliamentary testimony two months earlier haunted Sweden: “It could have been prevented. If society had assumed its responsibility for integrating my family, it could have been prevented. If the Kurdish Association had helped my family, it could have been prevented.” Thereafter, a foundation in Fadime’s memory was inaugurated, and Sweden reformed its multicultural approach to gender violence.

In 2007, the Associated Press reported on an apparent honor killing in Jordan, when a father fatally shot his 17-year-old daughter whom he suspected of being sexually active despite a medical exam performed before her death that proved her virginity, according to a government forensic pathologist from Jordan's National Institute of Forensic Medicine. Previously, the young woman had apparently "run away from home several times for unknown reasons." She returned home from a family protection clinic after doctors "vouched for her virginity" and her father signed a pledge not to harm her. The pathologist reported that an autopsy also demonstrated her virginity.

On May 18, 2007, four Yazidi men were arrested for killing 17-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad in Bashiqa, Iraq for being seen with a Sunni Muslim. The April 7 attack was recorded on a cell phone camera and broadcast around the world, bringing international attention to practice of honor killing.