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| November 25, 2002 | Monday | Ramazan 19, 1423 |
Womenfolk fighting honour killing
ISLAMABAD, Nov 24: While Pakistan fights global terrorism alongside the United States and its allies, the country’s women are engaged in their own war against the terror of escalating “honour” killings.
Such murders — where a man kills a woman he views as having sullied his “honour” — are on the rise, the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) says, “with more and more reported from areas where they had once been unknown”.
In 2001, at least 226 women in the southern province of Sindh were killed — usually by their husbands or brothers — while some 227 honour-related killings took place in the Punjab, according to the HRCP’s annual report issued earlier this year.
“The real figures are likely to be higher,” says the Commission’s Kamila Hyat, adding that figures were not compiled for Pakistan’s other two provinces because of the sketchy nature of reports.
Academic Tahira Khan, who has spent five years studying honour killings, agrees that the trend is upwards.
At the heart of the killings are ingrained social attitudes towards female sexuality, and changing attitudes of women to their own sexuality through greater exposure to the rest of the world, she says.
Such new attitudes have led them to “protest against forced marriages, assert their right to get married according to their own choice, or reject marriage”, which can lead to a family backlash as serious as murder.
But killings can occur over actions much less momentous — a mere flirtatious look misconstrued as a sign of an illicit relationship can be a catalyst to murder.
Finding a female relative in a so-called “objectionable” or “compromising” position with another man, often meaning that the two are merely alone together in the same room, is often used to justify honour killings.
Perhaps most worryingly, so-called fake honour killings are surging to the point of being an “epidemic”, Ms Khan says.
Fake honour killings are when a man kills a woman, usually a relative, to cover up the real reason he has murdered another man.
Alleging his honour was outraged by saying he saw them in a compromising position is enough to win him a lesser sentence under the country’s court system, says Shahnaz Bokhari of the Progressive Women’s Association.
Since 1994 the non-governmental organization has dealt with some 5,000 cases of honour-related crimes in the region surrounding the capital, Islamabad.
“On my fingertips I can count the success stories out of these cases,” she fumes. “This violence is on the rise because the prosecution rate is negligible... men know they can get away with it.”
The positive aspect of greater awareness is that more women are reporting crimes against them.
“We can no longer say we’re seeing just the tip of the iceberg,” she says, estimating that around 40 per cent of the cases are reported.—AFP
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