Honour Crimes

RANIA ARAFAT, FROM Amman in Jordan, might have turned 28 this year if her two aunts had not turned up at her door one morning in 1997. They said they had arranged a secret meeting with her boyfriend, with whom she had been conducting an illicit affair. However, when the three arrived at the supposed rendezvous point, the aunts stepped aside, and Rania was shot in the head by her younger brother.

Forbidden love

Earlier this year, on 2 June, a Jordanian man shot his unmarried cousin dead as she recovered in hospital after delivering a baby. The 35-year-old then surrendered to police, saying he acted to cleanse the family's honour. Stunned medical staff were present as the man and his two brothers ran into the woman's room, and opened fire, hitting the 25-year-old mother with six bullets. The day-old baby boy lying next to her, delivered by Caesarean section, was unharmed, and was later sent to a government welfare institution.
Approximately every two weeks in Jordan a woman is killed by a male relative because of the shame she is thought to have brought upon her family by an alleged sexual transgression. 'Sins' include being raped. Jordan's Queen Rania leads the campaign against honour killings in the country, though politicians there and elsewhere have been reluctant to introduce tougher sanctions for murders where family honour is a motive. The killers, on average, receive light penalties of around six months' imprisonment because they tend to be sentenced under legislation which reduces sentences for crimes committed in a 'fit of rage' sparked by an 'unlawful action' on the part of the victim. Efforts to impose harsher penalties on men who kill their daughters and sisters suffered a fresh setback in the Jordanian parliament a year ago when deputies refused to sanction an amendment to the penal code. Women activists had wanted a minimum five-year sentence for honour crimes. The day after parliament sat, three brothers hacked to death their two sisters with axes for reason of 'family honour'.
The issue was poignantly brought to international attention earlier this year with the publication of the book Forbidden Love by Norma Khouri, who wrote a tribute to her best friend Dalia - killed by her father in Amman after she started an affair with a Christian boy. Curiously, when it comes to determining who is ultimately to blame for the killing of young women by their male relatives, there is reluctance to point the finger at the men themselves. I know it would be much simpler and easier if there were certain types of men who did this, said Norma Khouri shortly after her book was published, but Dalia's father was not a cruel monster; in many ways, he was a typical Arab man, just like my dad. There are social, cultural and traditional pressures on these men, who are constantly told that the family honour is at stake. Female relatives also play a role in the murder of their daughters, sisters and nieces. Many do so because they are scared they will be tarred with the same brush if they refuse to co-operate, others because they too believe the family's good name has been disgraced.

An international issue

In April, police in the Turkish city of Istanbul detained a father on suspicion of murdering his 14-year-old daughter after she was raped. The man, and a dozen relatives held with him, were accused of taking a collective decision to kill the girl for bringing shame on the family name. The girl was abducted the previous month, and repeatedly raped before she escaped. A few days after her return, the father reported her missing, but allegedly confessed to killing her later. Strangled with a wire, and buried in a forest, she was only discovered after police received an anonymous call. The case provoked a huge media outcry in Turkey, with many newspapers criticising the government for delaying changes to the penal code to toughen penalties. Human rights groups estimate there are dozens of such killings in Turkey each year, mostly in the conservative eastern regions.
In Pakistan, honour killings are rampant. At least 631 women, and six girls, died in murders perpetrated by their own relatives in the country during the first eight months of 2003. About half of the deaths were reported in the southern Sindh province, but many more cases were believed to have gone unreported in the conservative communities of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province, both bordering Afghanistan. They are recognised as murder in the higher levels of government and the judiciary, yet there has been little effective action to prevent them from happening. In 2002 Amnesty International accused the Pakistani government of failing to protect women from increasing violence. In 2000, Mohammed Umar Magsi killed his 11-year-old daughter with an axe because he suspected her of having an affair; when his wife and younger daughter tried to intervene, he killed them as well. The following year, a 60-year-old widow, Hidayat Khatoon, and 55-year-old Baksh Ali were killed by the widow's son. When he surrendered to police, he said he had been teased by villagers over his mother's alleged affair and had therefore killed them both. The emergence of 'fake honour' killings in Pakistan is a worrying new trend. There is a pattern of men accusing their wives of being dishonourable with wealthy men purely for financial gain. The wife is declared kari (one who brings shame), and is killed. The suspected man is then made to pay off the husband and is 'pardoned'.
In Iran, 45 young women were murdered in so-called honour killings in Iran's majority ethnic Arab south-western province of Khuzestan during a two-month period in 2003. An aide to the province's governor acknowledged that year that none of the crimes went through the courts. Based on reports we have received, 45 girls under the age of 20 from just one tribe were murdered in 'honour killings' carried out by either their fathers, uncles, brothers or cousins, Pari Mirbeyk said. They kill the girl and burn her identification card, he added, and since there are no concrete laws to combat this they usually walk free, or otherwise nothing is reported in the first place.

What is honour killing?

Honour killing is a complex but brutal reaction within a family against someone who is perceived to have brought 'shame' upon relatives. It is a problem that continues to this day, predominantly in south Asian and Middle Eastern countries and their migrant communities around the world. What constitutes this dishonour depends entirely on the family involved - but experts in the field say it can be anything from wearing 'inappropriate' clothes or choosing a career which the family disapproves of, to marrying outside of the ethnic or religious community. As with the majority of bitter family rows, a dispute may just end with relatives never speaking to each other again. But in the extreme circumstances seen in honour crimes the person believed to have brought the 'dishonour' upon the family is murdered. The majority of victims are women in communities or families dominated by men, although women - sisters and mothers - also play a part in some of the crimes.
None of the world's major religions condone these killings, although many of the guilty have tried to justify their actions on religious grounds. The key factors are cultural and generational divisions, the victim's refusal to toe a line, and a reaction against a family or clan's self-proclaimed code or rules. In that sense, honour killings are much more about male-dominated societies and communities that try to stop women taking their own decisions. In other words, the killers believe it is culturally acceptable for them to murder to preserve, in their mind, the good name of the family.
More recently, in the age of migration around the world, the murders have come where a family reacts violently to a son or daughter taking on the trappings of a Western culture. For instance, accusations of dishonour may emerge because someone from an older migrant generation remains utterly tied to the culture or code of their village - and fails to accept their children have been brought up in modern British society with all that goes with that. Fortunately, the number of people who believe that violence in the name of honour is justified is very small.

UK experience

In a 1997 book, Leeds-born Jack and Zena Briggs (not their real names) described how they had spent years on the run because Zena's family violently opposed their relationship. Zena, from a Pakistani family, had been promised to a Kashmiri hill farmer - but when the family discovered her relationship with Jack, they were relentlessly pursued. Zena's father told her she was already dead in his eyes while her sister predicted they would end up in bin bags. Jack's mother was terrorised by people looking for the young lovers. One of the key themes of the book is how the couple felt the authorities failed to help. Critics say that in the past many agencies have been reluctant to act against honour disputes because they have either completely failed to understand the culture or decided not to get involved on wholly-misguided grounds of cultural sensitivities.
Police believe there may be around 12 honour killings each year in the UK. One of the most horrific and well publicised cases of recent years was that of 16-year-old Heshu Yones, a teenage girl from an Iraqi Kurdish family in London. In 2002, Heshu's father Abdullah stabbed her to death because he disapproved of her Western dress and Christian boyfriend. He then attempted suicide, and at his 2003 murder trial appealed to the judge to receive a death sentence. The case triggered an on-going police investigation into the warning signs of honour crimes. More than 100 murders from the last decade are currently being examined in an effort to better understand and predict the signs of a potential honour killing or ongoing abuse. The police are also looking at other related factors, such as rates of domestic violence. Campaigners also want them to look at suicide, saying the disproportionately high rate of self harm among British Asian women can be linked to honour disputes. The police say the most important change they have made is to tell officers to treat reports of honour crimes the same way as they are supposed to treat domestic violence - even if there is no clear evidence, it should be investigated.
Significantly, the Muslim Council of Britain spoke out after the conviction of Yones to say that it did not condone so-called honour killings. Its spokesman, Inayat Bunglawala, also told the BBC that the case was not symptomatic of a widespread problem in the Muslim community.

Global action

There is now an acknowledgement that honour crimes in the UK can be linked to those in other parts of Europe, and that police forces around the continent must learn from each other. In some cases families are believed to have hired foreign bounty hunters or contract killers. These individuals come into a country, kill the victim, and then quickly disappear back into the countries they came from. Some honour killings also involve sending the victim back to the family's home nation to be killed there, a crime that may never be reported. These cases have proved extremely difficult to investigate in the past, especially if the local police authorities are reluctant to get involved. Throughout Europe there have been calls for leaders in mosques, temples and churches to do more, and for schools and social services to be alert to warning signs such as teenagers facing family problems.
In June, European police officials met to look at ways of tackling the rising phenomenon of honour killings. They aimed to set up a pan-European unit to combat the murders and crack down on related issues such as trafficking. Police forces from across Europe re-opened murder files related to families of Turkish, Middle Eastern, Asian, Arabic and Eastern European origin over the past 10 years. The re-examination of past cases has been welcomed by members of communities most affected by the murders. Diana Nammi, director of the International Campaign Against Honour Killing, has said she believes these killings are more widespread than official figures suggest and that we need to stop these murders, and this move by the police is very positive.