Abstract
Honor killing is a serious social problem in some countries that is yet to be adequately explained and addressed. We start with an overview of the conceptualization of this phenomenon and review its global prevalence. We argue that honor killing cannot be fully explained by focusing only on religion and sexism. We present a feminist Durkheimian analysis of honor killing as a form of informal social control and argue that honor killing represents a ‘dark side of modernity’ in which the systematic marginalization and stigmatization of minorities and social groups have led them to rely more on traditional honor codes as a kind of informal social control, exacerbating honor crimes. We discuss how a more effective approach to combat honor killing requires not only addressing the issues of sexism and religious fundamentalism, but also the systematic exclusion and stigmatization of local groups and minorities.
Highlights
Honor killing is a harmful and disturbing form of the control over women’s behavior
Based on the reports we reviewed, numerous women fall victim to honor killing despite the efforts of various organizations against this form of violence
We presented two common explanations of honor killing, sexism and religious fundamentalism, and argued that honor killing is a specific kind of domestic violence that requires a deeper explanation to account for the condition under which it occurs
Summary
Honor killing is a harmful and disturbing form of the control over women’s behavior. There have been various efforts to decrease honor killing incidences, including the work of international organizations (e.g., World Health Organization [WHO] and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women [CEDAW]), local activism and organizations (e.g., human right activists and lawyers, NGOs), legal reformation (e.g., rejection of ‘honor’ defense in legal codes for murdering family members in Brazil in 1991 and in Turkey in 2009), and even cinema (e.g., The Paternal House [2012] by Kianoush Ayari, The Bride of Fire [2000] by Khosrow Sinai). Our hope is that a better understanding of underlying causes will open a new front to combat this hideous crime against women and subsequently increase the effectiveness of the current efforts and activism dedicated to decrease and hopefully eliminate such crimes
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