Abstract
Popular representations of Honour Based Violence (HBV) and honour killings construct this violence as an artefact of an uncivilised code of morality. Here ird, sharaf or izzat and shame are adhered to particular moral codes that are more likely to be found in the Quran. This clichéd version of HBV frames Muslim women’s sexual autonomy as exceptionally regulated, most commonly by male family members with the complicity of female relatives. In its most extreme (and publicly known) form, HBV is epitomised by the ‘honour’ killings that come to the attention of the criminal justice system and, as a consequence, the media. Yet emerging research shows that HBV unfolds through increasingly punitive systems of social punishment, which is neither unique to Islam, nor religious communities more generally. In this paper, it is argued that the construction of HBV as a matter of deviant and antiquated Muslim honour codes is Islamophobic and that a more productive lens through which to understand collective familial violence may lie in the conceptual framework of heteronormativity.
Highlights
Popular representations of Honour Based Violence (HBV) and honour killings construct this violence as an artefact of an uncivilised code of morality, often conflated with Islamic codes of honour
In its most extreme and public forms, HBV is epitomised by the honour killings that come to the attention of the criminal justice system and, as a consequence, the media
Knowledge of these violent crimes is limited in Australia, with only the murder of Mohd Shah Saemin coming to the attention of Australian courts and media as an ‘honour killing’ (Souter 2012)
Summary
Popular representations of Honour Based Violence (HBV) and honour killings construct this violence as an artefact of an uncivilised code of morality, often conflated with Islamic codes of honour. Unlike conventional domestic, intimate-partner or family violence (and the majority of hate crimes reported to the London Metropolitan Police Service), these cases of intrafamilial hate crimes were slightly more likely than racist hate crimes to include two or more offenders These incidents – and arguably all hate crimes against gay men and lesbians – represent a form of collective (or social) punishment that mirrors the violence meted out to remedy a (perceived) transgression in sexual or gender codes of conduct in HBV cases (Asquith 2012a; Cooney 2014). When considered through these conceptual and empirical outliers, the efficacy of HBV exceptionalism is questionable, especially in light of its Islamophobic construction as a predominantly Muslim practice (Gill and Brah 2014)
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