More than 5,000 women and girls around the world each year are killed, not at the hands of strangers but by their own fathers,brothers and other males in their family in so-called honor killings. [link]

It is the punishment often meted out to women suspected of unsanctioned sexual behavior and believed to have brought shame on the family. Honor killings are most prevalent in strictly traditional societies in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. But they also occur in the West

The biggest lie perpetuated is to call these cowardly murders “honor killings” .There is no honor involved, only cowardice and misogyny. The rise in honor killings in the West, unfortunately, is attributable to immigrant communities- some of them South Asian.The article quotes Jasvinder Sanghera, a desi whose parents tried to force her into marriage. She turned activist after her sister Robina, committed suicide over an abusive marriage.

Sanghera explained. “She cried for help because she was suffering horrific domestic violence in her relationship and every time she went to the family she was told to go back and make the marriage work for the sake of honor, their honor. So, she went back and in the end she set herself on fire.”

Shazia Qayum, a British-Pakistani woman, spent five years living in shelters, trying to flee a forced marriage. She is now the spokeswoman for the government-sponsored Forced Marriage Unit.With Britain seeing 12 ‘honor killings’ a year, the government there is forced to do something about it.

Not that North America is immune. On New Year’s Day, two teenage Egyptian-American sisters, Amina and Sarah Said, were shot dead in Irving, Texas by their father who was angered by the fact that they were dating.In December,a Canadian teenager died after an alleged attack by her father over a dispute about whether she should wear a traditional Muslim head scarf. (link)

DAYA, which runs a domestic violence hotline, has seen a dramatic increase in distress calls –almost 20 times more — in the last five years (from 189 calls in 2003 to 3,308 last year).
It isn’t clear if the increase in calls is due to more abuse or whether more immigrant women, exposed to America’s open culture, have felt the freedom to seek help.

This is a perversion of cultural pride in ‘respect for elders’ and ‘family values’. Women are treated as second -class citizens – even miles away from the homeland. While clinging to tradition may be a way of coping with culture shock, at its ‘extreme it results in unimaginable horrors – all in the name of an ill-defined ‘honor’, achieved at the cost of young lives.

Domestic violence is unquestionably a global phenomenon cutting across economic, religious and social borders. However, giving brutal murders the appellation of ‘honor’ killings unnecessarily elevates them to a justifiable plane.

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