There are some crimes that are just gut wrenching to think about. “Honor” killing, the murder of a someone (usually a woman or girl) by family and friends over sex / marriage is an awful thing.
I object to it personally. as a father of a girl, I shudder to think what could bring a father or brother to slaughter their own kin. It cannot end soon enough for me.
There are some great resources committed to ending ‘honor’ killing, listed at the end of this post. If you know of others not listed here, please leave them in the comments field.
What has my mind today is not the ‘honor’ killings themselves but how the topic itself is discussed, presented and marketed in western societies – the EU and US. The news reports and accounts of these killings reveal these deaths in terms of the way they are carried out, along with details of religious and cultural practices that seem primitive, cruel and that fly in the face of any rule of fairness, reasoning or legal structure.
Sure, we get upset by such murders, but are these ‘honor’ killing being used to reinforce a “single story” about the populations where these killings occur? As Chimamanda Adichie illustrates well, repeated and dramatic negative images about a culture other than one’s own, can reduce our own awareness to a “single story” of who those people are. It lumps people into one-dimensional creations, not as complex and alive in our minds as we hold ourselves. It strips individuals of identity and reduces people to “one of those people”.
Chimiamanda talks about people being framed in a “patriarchal, well-meaning pity” by holding them in a “single story of catastrophe”.