Daily Times

What was the constraining motive for Othello in killing Desdemona? Honour, not jealousy surely, for would the merely jealous husband give vent to such feelings as Othello does? Whatever hold the passion of jealousy may have had over Othello before, he feels convinced that the calm, sorrowful but determined feeling of justice reigns supreme and love must yield to honour and justice. Honour is an essential possession, something that can belong to you and to you only; your money, on the other hand, remains what it is even if thousands of others have handled and possessed it. Compared to honour, then, money is mere ‘trash’. Sadly our society suffers from and has to deal with the issue of honour killings, a particular type of intra-family femicide in defence of honour and family respect. The legal, social, religious, nationalist and tribal dimensions and arguments on such killings are flooded with a hundred cases like poor Farzana Parveen, who was stoned to death by her father and brothers in front of the Lahore High Court. Drawing on historical and cultural source material, the role of family respect and shame, social values and other dynamics in normalising this practice today in our society is hard to analyse. Honour killings, which contradict many international and national laws and covenants, are clearly connected to the subordination of women in our culture and to the ‘crime-ing down’ of domestic violence. The prevailing discriminatory culture cannot change without implementing a comprehensive educational programme for socio-legal and political reforms.

What makes a father, brother and mother kill a close family member for honour’s sake? Why do women have to be killed or expelled from society for choosing their own lifestyles and partners? How can a father, who should be the protector, become the murderer of his own daughter? Understanding the sentiments and emotions involved in killing a close family relative is almost impossible but it is they who retain beneath the surface the savage passions of white blood and also suspicions regarding female chastity. Criminal insanity would explain a part of the pathological rage embedded within their bruised collective ego but the fact remains that these men and women end up coldbloodedly murdering the woman they were entrusted to protect and love the most. Crimes of honour are characterised by violence against women and are consequently not gender neutral. It is important to examine the status and relationship between gender and violence in Pakistan and other contexts in which these crimes are practiced. Criminal justice responses to the issue over the last 60 years in Pakistan have been mute and biased, leading to risky cultural and political subterfuge and ending in sanctioning the validity of this barbaric tribal culture. When macro-analysed, the viability of criminalisation is questionable because the official response to these crimes is often insensitive to women’s cultural circumstances. Society by and large and the nation as a whole have to stand up to reduce the numbers of these crimes against women.

On August 3, 2012, Shafilea Ahmed’s parents from Cheshire in the UK were convicted of her murder, nine years after the plea by defence lawyers of a case of ‘honour’ killing. The police wisely refused to call Shafilea’s murder an ‘honour’ killing. The judge remarked that there can be no exonerating circumstance, no licence granted to those who claim cultural protection for brutality. Domestic violence and child sex abuse happen across cultures and ethnicities. But that only makes it more important that those charged with spotting it, supporting its victims and tackling its perpetrators, have the ability to understand what they are seeing and how to respond to it. The case offers important insights into how ‘honour-based’ violence might be tackled without constructing innate subsets of violence and hatred against women and naming it inherently cultural. Critiquing the framing devices that structure media debates about ‘honour-based’ violence demonstrates the prevalence of Orientalist tropes, revealing the need for new ways of thinking about culture that do not reify it or treat it as a singular entity that can only be tackled in its entirety. Instead, it is important to recognise that cultures consist of multiple, intersecting signifying practices that are continually ‘creolising’. Thus, rather than talking purely about culture, debates on ‘honour-based’ violence should explore the intersection of culture with gender and other axes of differentiation and inequality. Honour killing cases are hence ruled out as potential provocation cases and left outside the scope of the defence of ‘loss of control’, by assuming that in honour killing cases the defendant must have acted in a considered desire for revenge. However, the flawed assumption is that all honour killing cases are revenge killings. In light of the available evidence it seems there are honour killing cases the circumstances of which deserve to be left to a jury, as the desire for revenge is not the motive at all and the defendant was able to resist the pressure until the final triggering act.

No two elements are more important to establishing a civilised and open society than society’s respect for individual human rights and individual respect for and submission to the rule of law. These two elements, however, are not always compatible. When society adopts laws that undermine the basic rights of a class of citizens, a tension is created between an individual’s responsibility to respect society’s laws, and that same individual’s right to be protected and treated equitably by his or her society. This ‘honour killing’ scenario occurs when society adopts laws that selectively provide under-protection to women because of an immutable characteristic instead of providing equal protection to all. When analysing rationales it is shocking that cultural and personal systems of honour that depend on the behaviour of others are an integral part of the killing of women by their families or intimates. Comparing patterns of this malevolent conduct in both traditional cultures and in English-speaking countries show that the basic elements of such ‘honour’ rationales like control, feelings of shame, and collective-ego insult are a worldwide phenomenon. Approval of such ‘honour’ systems allows men in our culture to justify revenge against women who attempt to challenge male supremacy and their own subordination. Furthermore, it contributes to the collective pool of false pretentious ego framework that accounts for the cultural and contextual patterns of male-intimate violence. There is a strong tendency in men to consider violence against women as a personal and familial issue rather than a social and legal problem. Therefore, the preferred method for coping with their jealousy, incessant rage and humiliation is violence with the expectation that the female kin should be punished rather than allowed to change her behaviour and assume responsibility resorting to previous informal relations. What society less prefers is the coping methods which include confronting the husband and expressing desire to break up or separate and resorting to formal agents like counselling or the legal system. The implications of repeated abuse and severe physical violence as a last resort fails to defend the notion that different cultural understandings of honour inspire killing. Though there is substantial press on despicable cultural understandings of honour and shame that inspire violence in men, little has been written from the point of view of the killers who have committed and have been found guilty of murder in the name of honour. To gain a better understanding of different cultural perspectives of honour and shame that inspire honour killing, it is necessary to gather the accounts of these defendants and their understanding of actions to deplore the shameful fatal urge disguised as ‘honour’ in these people.

The writer is a member of the Diplomate American Board of Medical Psychotherapists Dip.Soc Studies, member Int’l Association of Forensic Criminologists, associate professor Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at the Huntercombe Group United Kingdom. He can be reached at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com