Execution by Family

A Theory of Honor Violence

Mark Cooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351240635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

Across many parts of the world, violence inflicted in the name of family honor is attracting an increasing amount of attention. Family honor violence, otherwise known as honor-based violence, is physical force inflicted primarily on women for conduct defined as dishonorable. This book explores these conflicts of honor, how they are triggered, how they are handled, and why some lead to death.

Drawing on a range of case studies and employing Donald Black's concept of social geometry, Execution by Family incorporates and goes beyond patriarchy, culture, and kinship to develop a unified theory of family honor violence. It discusses the "honor belt, " a series of countries stretching from north Africa to southeast Asia, in which similar forms of inequality, patriarchy, group authority, and gerontocracy are prevalent and how, within the confines of this inequality, honor violence flourishes. Reviewing survey data and pointing to a multi-pronged, cross-national social movement, the book also discusses the future of honor-based violence.

Given the growing awareness of family honor violence, Execution by Family will be of interest to anybody concerned with family conflict, violence, crime, and popular morality. It will be invaluable reading for academics and students in the fields of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, social psychology, and anthropology.

Part I

Description

Chapter 1

Introduction

Güldünya Tören was born into a large family of 11 children in southeastern Turkey. In her twenties, while still unmarried, she became pregnant by a married man. When her family learned of the pregnancy, they asked the man who impregnated her to take her as his second wife. When he refused, the family locked her in a room while they considered what to do. They decided to send her away to an uncle in Istanbul. One of her brothers followed her to the city and tried to strangle her. When he failed, he gave her the rope and urged her to commit suicide. Instead, Güldünya fled and took refuge with a retired imam and his family. She gave birth to a baby boy on December 1, 2003. The following February, her brother reappeared and said he wanted to take her to visit an aunt. When they reached the bus station, the brother left to find a taxi. A younger brother then appeared and shot Güldünya. She survived the shooting and was taken to a local clinic and from there she was moved to a hospital. At 3:45 a.m., the brother who had shot her reappeared in the hospital and shot her twice in the head as she lay in her bed. Left brain dead, her family took Güldünya off life support two days later (Pope 2012: 189–191).

Manoj, 23, and Babli, 19, had known each other since childhood. Members of the same clan, their secret marriage was valid in the eyes of the law but a violation of customary incest taboos. Knowing they were in danger, the couple sought to flee their village in the state of Haryana, India. But Babli’s relatives spotted them on a bus and dragged them off. Taken to a field, Babli was forced to drink pesticide by her brother; Manoj was garroted by Babli’s uncle in front of Babli. Their bodies were thrown into a canal (Lakshmi 2010; Thapar-Björkert 2014: 161).

Sixteen-year-old Tina Isa was having mounting problems with her Palestinian Muslim father and Brazilian Catholic mother because she was behaving like an American teenager. She played football at high school, had a black boyfriend, and attended the junior prom against her parents’ wishes. Unknown to her father, the FBI was bugging his house because they suspected him of being involved with Middle Eastern terrorism. When Tina returned home from work on November 6, 1989, the tapes picked up the following exchange between Tina and her parents:

Where were you, bitch?

Working.

We are telling you that if you want to marry that black guy we won’t accept that he marries you. Don’t you have a conscience? It’s fornication. What about your chastity, isn’t it a scandal? … Here, listen, dear daughter, do you know that this is the last day? Tonight you are going to die.

Tina’s father then stabbed her repeatedly in the chest, breaking her sternum and ribs, piercing her heart, and puncturing her left lung. Thirty minutes later, he called an ambulance and claimed that she had attacked him first (Husseini 2009: 203–207; Harris 1995: 154).

These are family honor killings – lethal violence inflicted on family members for bringing the family’s good name into disrepute (e.g., by having sex outside marriage), the perpetrators being primarily men and the targets primarily women, often young women in their teens and early twenties. While most family honor violence is not lethal, every year substantial numbers of people around the world are beaten, bludgeoned, poisoned, stabbed, strangled, drowned, incinerated, shot, or otherwise killed in its name.

What is it?

Family honor violence appears to have a long history (see, e.g., Tillion 1966: 114). Societies in which it has been practiced include ancient India, Babylonia, South- and Meso-American civilizations, Rome, and pre-Islamic Arabia (Ortner 1978; Goldstein 2002; Baron 2006). In Kurdistan, family honor violence dates back to at least the mid-1800s (Payton 2015: 251). A visitor to Palestine in the 1850s reported that in Bethlehem “the fathers and husbands are said to be severe and rigid disciplinarians, and dishonor is punished with certain death” (Rogers 1862: 121). The killing of women for adultery or other moral offenses appears to have been quite common in nineteenth-century colonial Pakistan (Shah 2016: 63–64). Twentieth-century anthropologists documented family honor violence in several Mediterranean and Adriatic societies, including Greece and Albania (Campbell 1964: 199–200; Hasluck 1954: 212–215). Today, it is concentrated among certain communities in a belt of countries stretching from northwest Africa across the Middle East and into South Asia. Within these countries, family honor violence appears to be particularly strong in remote rural areas, such as the Hindu Kush mountains and Upper Sindh regions of Pakistan (see, e.g., Amnesty International 1999; Kardam 2005; Knudsen 2009: Shah 2016). However, it also occurs in cities and among emigrants in Western nations such as Germany, England, Holland, Sweden, and the United States (see, e.g., Wikan 2003; Husseini 2009; Oberwittler and Kasselt 2014).

The frequency of honor violence

How often family honor violence occurs is unclear. One reason is that there is no universal definition of honor violence. Different countries, different writers, different police departments define it differently. Part of the problem is that, as we shall see, there is no bright-line cutoff where honor violence – however defined – ends and other forms of violence begin. What, if any, is the difference between honor violence and domestic violence? Between honor killings committed by husbands and other killings committed by husbands? Or between honor killing and lynching? I define family honor violence as physical force inflicted by a family on one of its members for undermining the family’s moral status. The quintessential honor killing is a father or brother killing a pregnant unmarried daughter or sister.

Regardless of definitions, violence of all kinds is undercounted and family violence all the more so (Black 1976: 40–46). A push, shove, slap, or punch by a stranger is much more likely to be reported to police or researchers as an “assault” than is the same conduct by a family member (see, e.g., Felson and Paré 2005). Although deaths are harder to conceal than injuries, the manner in which honor killings are committed makes them hard to count as well (Kulczycki and Windle 2011: 1448–1450). Some occur secretly: the dishonored woman disappears and is never heard of again (see, e.g., Knudsen 2009: 131). Indeed, secret killings have likely increased as a result of more certain and severe legal penalties. And many incidents that appear to be suicides or accidents may, in fact, be disguised honor killings (see, e.g., Doğan 2014b: 404). For instance, in Iraqi Kurdistan an unusually large number of women suffer injury or death as a result of being burnt in the home. In the first eight months of 2008 alone, there were reports of some 290 such cases. The burnings are normally attributed to accidental cooking or heating malfunctions. A team of sociologists who studied the phenomenon were highly skeptical:

We are struck by the fact that, when there is a case of a woman being burnt due to such “accidents,” in very few cases are there any other persons exposed to injury. Kurdish families are usually large and busy, and women rarely find themselves alone or not part of familial observation. However, we are led to believe that, with the exception of a few cases, when a woman has a burns accident, no one is ever nearby, witnesses it, or is at risk of immolation. If we also consider the low level of survival, brought upon by extensive burns, even greater suspicion is generated. When a cooking or heating appliance fails and causes a fire, one would expect immediate evasive and remedial action to be taken by anyone around, by others in immediate dangers, and by all the people sharing the same space. How is it that women in accidents are the only ones suffering very extensive – or any – burns?

(Begikhani et al. 2015: 61)

A few researchers have tried alternative ways of estimating the prevalence of honor killings in a given setting. A 1994–1995 survey of university students in Jordan found that 13 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women had been personally exposed to honor killings (Araji and Carlson 2001: 600, 603). A West Bank study analyzed the 2000–2001 deaths reported to public health authorities of single women of reproductive age (15–49) – the group most likely to be targeted for honor killing (Al-Adili et al. 2008). Two of 154 such deaths had been recorded as honor killings. (Two additional honor killings were of married women.¹) However, after conducting forensic autopsy interviews with family members the research team had reason to believe that the true number was higher. The two unmarried women known to have been killed for dishonor were part of a larger group of seven single women who were shot dead either by their father, a relative, or an unknown person. Two of the shooting deaths involved a pair of sisters, aged 18 and 25, who were killed by multiple bullets to the head inside their house; their father stated he had no idea why they had been killed. Moreover, Al-Adili et al. (2008) found at least three cases of alleged suicide among the single women that could have been related to dishonor. In one such case, a young woman died of a drug overdose, although according to her sister she had been a “very well-behaved person” (Al-Adili et al. 2008: 118). Since there had been rumors of sexual abuse within the family, the death may have been an attempt to get rid of her before the disgrace became publicly known. Thus, even painstaking investigation of the cause of deaths does not always yield clear conclusions.

Complicating matters still further is over-recording: some incidents are incorrectly tabulated as honor killings; they are, in fact, “fake honor killings” (Amnesty International 1999). Since honor killings are typically tolerated in the community, a man might kill his sister claiming dishonor in order to acquire her inheritance. Or he might kill his wife claiming dishonor in order to avoid paying further installments of bridewealth. Or he might rid himself of an enemy and seek to get away with it by claiming that the enemy had dishonored his sister by having sex with her. Honor can be used as a pretext for different forms of violence (Husseini 2009: 19–23; Payton 2015: 203–204; Khan 2006: 179–182; Shah 2016).

Fake honor killings appear to be particularly frequent in Pakistan. There, honor killings are called karo-kari killings. Karo means black man; kari means black woman, the idea being that both have blackened their name through dishonorable conduct. If the woman’s family kills both the woman and the man, the matter generally ends for them. If only the woman is killed and the man escapes (a fairly common outcome), he or his family must compensate the family of the woman or risk being killed. This has given rise to what some commentators call an “honor killing industry.” Men have been known to kill a female relative, name a man of means as karo, and then extort compensation from him. For example, a man indebted to a bank killed his own mother and labeled the bank manager as karo. The bank manger had to pay a large sum of money to avoid being killed and to compensate the killer for loss of his mother and of his honor. Other forms of predation disguised as honor violence have been recorded as well. In another case, a man killed his wife and then killed a man in a neighboring village who was asleep in his bed. Frightened, the dead man’s family fled the village, leaving the killer free to seize their land for himself (Amnesty International 1999).²

Then there is the issue of who creates the statistics. The two main groups are state (especially legal) officials and activists. Their concerns diverge. Legal officials often downplay honor killing either because they support it (or at least do not oppose it) or because it is an embarrassment to the state (see, e.g., Al-Eryani et al. 2007: 118). Thus, even if the state’s crime statistics are well organized – which they may well not be – honor killings may be severely undercounted. Feminist and human rights activists, on the other hand, often have their ears closer to the ground and a more realistic sense of what is going on. But activists wish to draw attention to honor killing and one way of doing that is to show that it occurs with alarming frequency. The result is that widely different estimates are possible from the same setting. For instance, in 2005, while legal officials recorded 12 honor killings in the Occupied Territories, women’s groups reported 27; in 2006, the difference was zero compared to 29 (Al-Rafai 2007: 73).

The most commonly quoted statistic, derived from the United Nations Population Fund, is that some 5,000 women and girls are killed for family honor every year, or an average of about 100 per week (UNFPA 2000: 29). But the authors of the statistic do not tell us how they arrived at this number. Is 5,000 an overestimate, an underestimate, or a reasonably accurate estimate? We do not know. Since the killings are often seen as a private matter, of concern only to the family and local community, many may remain unknown to the wider public. In addition, many of the countries in which they occur most often do not track violence of any kind very accurately. The 5,000 number is therefore little more than an informed guess. Bad as the statistics are today, they are even worse in respect of the past (Abu-Lughod 2011: 4). Consequently, we do not know whether honor...