Ethnic Killings/ Honour Killings: Right or Wrong???

‘Honour Killings’ are extreme acts of domestic violence culminating in the murder of a woman by her family or community. However only in relation to religious and ethnic communities is the concept of ‘honour’ invoked as motivation for domestic violence. Women who are victims of honour killings are invisible within the cultural relativism of the British multicultural discourse and the private/public divide which characterises the domestic violence discourse.

We are listening these issues of honour killings from much earlier times. These issues also came up at the time of partition. Both women of Hindu and Muslim religion were abducted, raped and looted by males of opposite communities in which the girls were either murdered by their own families in the name of honour or they had to got married by the men who raped them. That was the time of most honour killing issues.

Honour Killings has been defined as ” The killing of women for suspected deviation from sexual norms imposed by the society”. These are extreme acts of violence perpetrated upon a women when an honour code is believed to have been broken and perceived shame is brought upon the family. What marks so called ‘honour killings’ is that it is not just the husband or partner that may carry out the act, but also the community and other family members such as mothers, brothers, uncles, or cousins.

However in the UK honour killings as a specifc phenomena is perceived by the media and government agencies as a crime that is practiced only among certain minority ethnic groups. Thus honour killings as domestic violence has become ‘ethnicised’ within the British multicultural context. While we recognise that ethnic groups and communities do have specific religious and cultural traditions which they may themselves label as honour based, why, in the context of ethnicity, is domestic violence treated as a culturally specific
honour crime by our wider organisations and institutions?

Focusing on culturally specific forms of domestic violence is often seen as very controversial ground. However culture has been used in some UK cases of honour killings where the defendant has tried to push for a more lenient sentence by pleading a
cultural defence. It is generally disputed that culture can explain how and why particular practices happen. In vulnerable and racialised communities there are tensions between protecting men from the racism of state agencies and negative media representation on the one hand, and the need to raise the issue of gendered violence and protect women’s rights in these communities on the other.

However, liberal multiculturalism in its many and shifting manifestations has consistently functioned to privilege ‘race’ and ethnicity over gender. Multiculturalism deals with problems between communities, but not problems within communities as it fails to recognise the gendered power divisions within ethnic groups.Gender differences within the multicultural discourse now and in the past have yet to be recognised.The Government’s
Community Cohesion reports fail to look at the specificity of gendered social action.

With the appropriate enforcement of the Human Rights Act (2000) in the UK, it is possible to move away from the ‘gender trap’ of cultural relativism inherent within liberal democratic discourse on multiculturalism, where gender is rendered at best marginal, or at worst invisible. In the absence of global social and political reform of violent patriarchal cultures where masculinity and honour is linked to female control, we can use human rights law- based challenges to develop a more equitable and culturally neutral perspective where women’s rights are ensured and privileged over patriarchal cultural practices. By adopting a realist human rights approach which is predicated upon challenging the gender-biased corporate identity of the British multicultural State, black and Asian feminist activists who are in the process of redefining the ‘we‘, not only in their own communities but in the multicultural nation, have already begun to challenge the injustice of culturally endorsed domestic violence at its heart.

Refrences:- Gender, violence and multiculturalism by Heidi Safia Mirza