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Honor Killing
Honor killing is the practice of a family member killing a female relative when the female relative has been considered to have brought "dishonor" to the family, often through unsanctioned sexual activityoften including cases when a woman is raped. The killing (or "execution") of the female relative is often considered, in those societies and cultures where it is practiced, to be a private matter for the affected family alone; rarely do non-family members or the courts become involved or prosecute the perpetrators. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the annual worldwide total of honor killings may be as high as 5,000 women.
Definitions
Human Rights Watch defines "honor killings" as follows:
Honor crimes are acts of violence, usually murder, committed by male family members against female family members who are perceived to have brought dishonor upon the family. A woman can be targeted by her family for a variety of reasons including, refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorceeven from an abusive husbandor committing adultery. The mere perception that a woman has acted in a manner to bring "dishonor" to the family is sufficient to trigger an attack.
Honor killings can also target those who choose as boyfriends/lovers or spouses members of another religious or ethnic group other than the family's own. Women who adopt customs (or a religion) of an outside group may also be more likely to be victims.
Many critics hold that the practice is self-contradictory: honor killing is justified by participants or supporters as an attempt to uphold the morals of a religion or a code which, at the same time, generally forbids killing as morally wrong (see below concerning Islamic countries).
History
Similar practices have been known since ancient Roman times, when the pater familias, or senior male within a household, retained the right to kill an unmarried but sexually active daughter or an adulterous wife. Europe has been familiar with the practice since ancient empires under Christian and Jewish law in which crimes such as adultery, were punished often with stoning. Such practices has long since ceased to be endemic in North America, although immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East have brought the practice with them in recent decades.
Honor killings, generally considered premeditated, are typically held to be distinct from Crimes of passion, which occur, not uncommonly, in European and Western societies and throughout the world. Crimes of passion often have special status under the law. For instance, until 1975, the French Penal Code commuted the sentence of a husband who killed his wife after finding her in the act of committing adultery [3]; this law passed into the legal frameworks of the many nations who based their modern legal codes on the Napoleonic Code. However, crimes of passion are limited in scope and are different from premediated crimes against an adulterous spouse.
Source: Wikipedia.
