[BRIEF NOTE] Honour killings in the world
Dec. 12th, 2007 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldOne comment that I deleted in yesterday's honour killing of Aqsa Parvez began as an address to "all those who are turning a blind eye to this vicious religion creeped in as a snake in this country.This country use to be called judeo christian today we are a multi racial country,and who ever said that multiculturism works look in the mirror one more time and crie." It went on in that kind of vein, the writer eventually concluding that "I think our troops have some work to do here at home and not just in afganistan."
The conclusion of the commenter can be easily dismissed: I very much doubt that the War Measures Act can be used to justify waging anything close to a war against hundreds of thousands of peaceful people living on Canadian soil, many of whom are Canadian citizens. Still more to the main thrust of the commenter's argument, honour killings are hardly unique to Islamic societies, as explained at National Geographic.
More to the point, even in the developed West people who commit crimes of passion have often enjoyed a certain degree of leniency, as Ruth Buddell's post-graduate dissertation "Crimes of Passion: Should they be distinguished from the offence of murder in England and Wales?" outlines, with Mediterranean Europe being particularly prominent.
The conclusion of Danilo Dolci in his A Passion for Sicilians (pages 128 to 129), that crimes of passion are produced by atomized societies where violence is accepted as a legitimate way to settle disputes, seems sound. Dolci's interlocutor further observed that honour killings rarely happened among Sicilian emigrants. Similarly, it's worth noting that this was the first honour killing recorded in Canada.
Leaving these extreme examples of outright murder of women aside, it's not as if Canadians can claim that Canada's component cultures have never sanctioned abuse against uppity women, or uppity members of other groups for that matter. Though the socially-acceptable limits of the particular discriminatory social dysfunction of misogyny take different forms in different contexts and in different societies, the overall justification remains sadly the same.
The conclusion of the commenter can be easily dismissed: I very much doubt that the War Measures Act can be used to justify waging anything close to a war against hundreds of thousands of peaceful people living on Canadian soil, many of whom are Canadian citizens. Still more to the main thrust of the commenter's argument, honour killings are hardly unique to Islamic societies, as explained at National Geographic.
Most honor killings occur in countries where the concept of women as a vessel of the family reputation predominates, said Marsha Freemen, director of International Women's Rights Action Watch at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
Reports submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights show that honor killings have occurred in Bangladesh, Great Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Uganda. In countries not submitting reports to the UN, the practice was condoned under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan, and has been reported in Iraq and Iran.
But while honor killings have elicited considerable attention and outrage, human rights activists argue that they should be regarded as part of a much larger problem of violence against women.
In India, for example, more than 5,000 brides die annually because their dowries are considered insufficient, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Crimes of passion, which are treated extremely leniently in Latin America, are the same thing with a different name, some rights advocates say.
"In countries where Islam is practiced, they're called honor killings, but dowry deaths and so-called crimes of passion have a similar dynamic in that the women are killed by male family members and the crimes are perceived as excusable or understandable," said Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
The practice, she said, "goes across cultures and across religions."
More to the point, even in the developed West people who commit crimes of passion have often enjoyed a certain degree of leniency, as Ruth Buddell's post-graduate dissertation "Crimes of Passion: Should they be distinguished from the offence of murder in England and Wales?" outlines, with Mediterranean Europe being particularly prominent.
The conclusion of Danilo Dolci in his A Passion for Sicilians (pages 128 to 129), that crimes of passion are produced by atomized societies where violence is accepted as a legitimate way to settle disputes, seems sound. Dolci's interlocutor further observed that honour killings rarely happened among Sicilian emigrants. Similarly, it's worth noting that this was the first honour killing recorded in Canada.
Leaving these extreme examples of outright murder of women aside, it's not as if Canadians can claim that Canada's component cultures have never sanctioned abuse against uppity women, or uppity members of other groups for that matter. Though the socially-acceptable limits of the particular discriminatory social dysfunction of misogyny take different forms in different contexts and in different societies, the overall justification remains sadly the same.
