What I am saying is that it doesn’t help to demonize a particular cultural practice. What does help is taking a look at the systems involved, and seeing if there is a way to change that.
For example, there was a case recently where a woman who was raped was given the chance to marry her rapists, who would then not have to serve any time. Sounds barbaric, right? Just a slap in the face to the woman or something.
Well, actually, in that culture what is “taken” in rape isn’t personal dignity as much as ones ability to marry in the future. Raping a woman condemns her to a shadow life as an unmarried woman and burdens her family with an unproductive (male child bearing- sons will eventually bring dowries that improve the whole families standard of living) mouth to feed. Because of the prevalence of blood feuds in the area, a rape can also lead to generations of killing between the families. Marrying the couple doesn’t make things better, but at least she has the option of living a somewhat normal life. After all, plenty of women are married to people they hate and can still find joy in their children and religion. And it allows one man’s act not to throw two families into chaos for decades.
If we had stopped at the first paragraph and said “What a horrible country! What a horrible judge!” we would never figure out what the problem actually was. Now we can focus on giving unmarried women more options in life and trying to open up, doing something about blood feuds, and opening up the definition of “marriageable woman”. See? Now we’ve done something productive.
Yes, Pakistan tacitly approves of honor killings. But I promise you nobody in Pakistan supports slaughtering all of your female offspring. This could be a chance for the public to begin to acknowledge that honor killing is a bad thing, and make more changes (notice that they’ve recently instituted mandatory minimum sentences) without appearing to cave to the west. Kind of how like Matthew Sheppard made it a bit more acceptable to support gay rights by tying a smaller less acceptable cause to a big universally accepted cause. Now, imagine if the gay rights people had started saying “This shows that everyone in America wants to brutally murder gays! America is a culture that supports killing gay people!” If we had been dumb enough to do that, it could have soured the public to the cause and ruined all that had been done.
An exaggeration. It seems clear that a substantial number of Pakistanis disapprove, however lax enforcement of the law has been.
Ludicrous strawman.
You missed this (again): “The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (bolded for your attention) said that in more than half of such cases that make it to court, most end with cash settlements paid by relatives to the victims’ families…”. So human rights advocates in Pakistan are calling attention to the situation, not just the decadent West.
A nifty solution. Except there are fewer options for murder victims.
Go back in time to America’s old South and the lynching of Emmett Till. Substitute “states’ rights” for “cultural sensitivity” and you have the same tired arguments about proceeding incrementally, not offending the locals with outside pressures etc.
That’s because she’s proceeding from the assumption that we don’t have the right to judge this other culture, or at least that if we do judge them as wrong, we still have to respect them and not strongly condemn the practice and to fuck with Pakistan’s cultural sensitivities. It’s a version of what the OP got jumped on about by the usual suspects. Guess Xtisme is kinda vindicated now.
No, you completely have the right to judge them and strongly condemn them. The practice of honor killing is reprehensible and should be stopped. However, we aren’t going to stop honor killing from our easy chairs in America. Only the Pakistanis can make it happen. And as long as we base our critiques on simple demonetization, we are only going to hurt the cause. But if we look at the real reasons behind honor killings (which isn’t “Pakistanis like to kill their families”) we can offer some helpful advice and support them as they make changes. Lumping every crime that happens in Pakistan together is a good example of how not to help eliminate this practice.
People have tried to ban suttee (widow burning) in India for the last 500 years. But they knew our vision of a screaming widow being thrown into a funeral pyre didn’t jive with their version on the widow dressed in her wedding finery calmly making a sacrifice of great piety and devotion and becoming a venerated person who’s shrines are celebrated centuries afterwards. It wasn’t until India got it’s own state and eliminated one of the major motivations for suttee by making shrines or veneration of suttees illegal that some real progress was made.
Yeah, and that’s exactly what’s happening in some parts of the Middle East. Turkey banned the practice of “honor” killings in its bid to be admitted to the EU. The governments of Pakistan and Iraq, likewise, are trying to eliminate it because they want legitimacy in the eyes of the West.
Like many deeply-rooted tribal practices, I doubt “honor” killings will ever completely disappear. But there is sufficient economic and political pressure from the West that governments will likely begin to prosecute offenders.
I think, though, that when you find that a country has actual laws which serve to legitimise honour killings (or rather - laws which decrease the sentence received) then it may be possible to infer a cultural aspect to the whole thing.
Laws are often a reasonable indicator of the social mores and values of a country. Honour killings are a particular problem in Jordan where 25% of their homicides each year are honour killings. Article 98 of the Jordanian penal code says:
A “wrongful act” could be said to include sex outside marriage (or adultery) if you class “wrongful” as anything outside of the religious strictures (in this case, islam).
Thus there have been cases of murderers getting away with extremely light sentences in Jordan because they used this Article as a defence.
Even France used to have such a law (repealed in 1975):
The other arab countries have similar laws. The solution is simple really - it’s a cultural thing exacerbated (if not actually created) by religious belief. They need to change their culture.
Changing one’s culture sounds like a big thing but it’s not really. Cultures change all the time, cultures are constantly changing. The culture of 1950s US or 1950s UK is remarkably different (whilst still similar) to the culture of today.
Since I’m not religious, I would ultimately like to see all the arab countries (and all the western countries) lose their religious belief too but that’s not necessary to get rid of honour killing. Changes in culture would probably do it. They just need to get on with it.