Honour Killings and Domestic Violence

On July 22, Shaher Bano Shahdady, was strangled. Her estranged husband, Abdul Malik Rustam, 27, was charged with first-degree murder.

The Shahdady murder at first seemed to be a typical, if especially brutal, instance of domestic violence.

Shahdady emigrated to Canada from Pakistan with her family as a baby. She was sent back to Pakistan to study at 13, and at 18 was married to Rustam, a cousin six years her senior.

The circumstances of her death are especially concerning. Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, says she was killed because Rustam couldn't tolerate his wife's failure to wear a head-to-toe veil and because she associated with other men on Facebook.

Fatah says the death was an honour killing; if so the Shahdady case raises some very troubling issues.

From the standpoint of Shaher Shahdady it doesn't make much difference why she was killed; she is dead and nothing will change that. But from a societal standpoint why she died matters a great deal.

Honour killing is rare. There have been slightly more than a dozen or so honour killings in Canada in the last decade. That compares to over forty domestic violence killings in Ontario every year. A woman murdered by her partner is very unlikely to have died in an honour killing. But mere numbers do not reveal the nature of the problem.

Very few people are killed by terrorist acts in North America and Europe. But those rare deaths have had the effect of changing the behaviour of society in profound ways. The free movement of people and goods has been imperiled and friendly relations among people of different faiths and backgrounds questioned. And yet these changes have been brought about by a very few incidents. It is not so much the fact of terrorism as the threat of terrorism that is important.

It is the same thing with honour killings.

Honour killings are directed at forbidding women from living their lives as they see fit. The women killed are the victims of the murders but the crimes are directed at a much larger audience.

Recently a graduate student from the University of British Columbia was blinded and maimed, apparently at the hands of her husband, while visiting her family in Bangladesh. The apparent motive for the crime was her decision to go ahead with higher education. Although only one individual was attacked the lesson was directed at all women both here and in Bangladesh. The lesson was that women do not have the right to chose how to live. Women must be subservient to their fathers, brothers and husbands.

Ordinary domestic violence usually arises in the context of a dysfunctional power relationship. While wrong and immoral the purpose of the violence is to attack the immediate victim being the spouse. While usually domestic violence involves an attack on a woman, there are numerous cases of men being assaulted and gender roles are not invariably involved in the violence.

Honour killings (or honour violence more generally) involves an attack for the purpose of showing that the actions of the victim, who is almost always a woman, are such as to deserve punishment. The lesson is that stepping out of line can lead to death or maiming. The immediate victim is somewhat irrelevant as the goal is deterrence of other women who may be considering such conduct. As the conduct almost always involves the exercise of a life choice by a woman the deterrence is an attempt to limit rights of women.

As a result honour killings have a broader effect on society and need close scrutiny. Domestic violence is wrong and must be curtailed -- honour killing takes domestic violence to a new height and needs to be rejected even more strongly. That does not mean we need another statute but it does mean that community leaders, and judges at sentencing, have to recognize honour killing for what it is, a form of domestic terrorism.