Interrogating cultural narratives about ‘honour’- based violence

Introduction

In recent years, societies around the world have begun to address the issue of ‘honour’-based violence (HBV), though with varying degrees of commitment (Idriss and Abbas, 2010). Broadly speaking, HBV encompasses any form of violence perpetrated against women within a framework of patriarchal family and social structures. The main justification for the perpetration of HBV is the protection of a value system predicated on norms and traditions concerned with ‘honour’: Unni Wikan defines honour killings as ‘murder[s] carried out in order to restore honour, not just for a single person but a collective’ (2008: 73). Critically, the definition supposes the approval of a supportive audience ready to reward murder with ‘honour’.

Social groups in which HBV is found maintain that individuals who violate prevailing honour codes bring dishonour to their entire family, which represents a significant threat to the family’s future and even its survival. The main consequence is ‘exclusion from the group’ (Stewart, 1994: 111). According to Sen (2005), honour crimes are actions that remove the stain of dishonour from a collective through the emotional, social or physical coercion of the person whose actual or imputed actions have brought about the (perceived) dishonour. Different violations of the honour code are associated with different punishments; thus, HBV manifests in numerous ways, including physical abuse (e.g. beatings), sexual abuse, emotional abuse (e.g. coercion), psychological abuse (e.g. threats) and financial abuse (e.g. withdrawal of financial support).

Many activists have stressed the importance of reconfiguring the accepted terminology in recognition of the fact that there is no ‘honour’ in ‘honour’ killings or any other form of HBV; the word ‘honour’ carries connotations that encourage perpetrators to view their actions as morally defensible when it is the opposite that should be associated with acts of murder and violence (Gill, 2009). Thus, ‘honour’ is enclosed in speech marks here, and elsewhere, to stress and re-stress the problems inherent in using this term. In Britain, the term has also been criticised on the basis that it has become racialised; its association with minority communities has fostered racialised representations that imply that immigrant cultures and traditions are both backward and unchanging. The implied corollary is that Britain is post-cultural and modern by contrast (Razack, 2008; Terman, 2010). However, HBV can be seen as a form of domestic violence as it involves similar sorts of actions committed by family members, albeit often for different ostensible reasons. In this light, given that domestic violence is commonplace in Western societies (Hallam, 2013), associating HBV with ‘uncivilised minorities’ takes on different implications that have more to do with racism and the ‘other’ than about HBV itself.

Gender and honour in South Asian communities

‘Honour’ is a symbolic and rhetorical construct whose meaning is constantly contested as it conveys different things in different contexts (Sen, 2005; Welchman and Hossain, 2005). Indeed, words translated into English as ‘honour’ rarely convey the totality of their culturally specific meanings, not least because they often lose their connotations, which distorts their meaning (Terman, 2010). For instance, the Urdu word izzat, often translated simply as ‘honour’, refers to a wide spectrum of sociocultural relationships and ties that bind family and community groups together.

Despite these definitional issues, ‘honour’ is generally considered to comprise three facets: ‘a sentiment, a manifestation of this sentiment in conduct, and the evaluation of this conduct in others’ (Pitt-Rivers, 1971: 21). In other words, it encompasses not only a person’s estimation of his or her own worth, but also the acknowledgement of that claim by his or her community through recognition of his or her right to pride. Thus, ‘honour’ often has multiple connotations and overlapping meanings related to respect, esteem, dignity, reputation and virtue.

However, Wikan (2008) contends that shame is a more informative concept: individuals in communities that value honour are not just motivated by a desire to obtain and maintain honour but are equally concerned about avoiding shame. Thus, honour and shame are dynamically interrelated in that honour ‘has to be continually reaffirmed in practice, reinforced in action, defended against challenge and re-won and advanced in competition’ (Mandelbaum, 1998: 23). Thus, honour relates to the behaviour expected of members of a particular community, while shame is associated with transgressions against these expectations. As such, shame is easier to measure as it necessarily involves an action or series of actions, while honour is a broad category that often defies classification.

On the whole, honour and shame have different practical implications for men and women. Women play a particularly important role in the maintenance of honour: they must avoid shameful behaviour and also police the conduct of other women to ensure that they do the same. Meanwhile, men are required to uphold their family and social group’s honour by ensuring that ‘their’ women avoid shame; although their own conduct is also the subject of scrutiny, this is often secondary to the scrutiny focused on their female relatives. Thus, in societies with honour-based value systems, honour is often equated with the regulation of women’s sexuality and their conformity with social norms and traditions.

The specific acts that are deemed to increase honour or erode it, causing shame, are subject to constant contestation and change. Indeed, such estimations vary between communities in both the Pakistani diaspora and Pakistan itself: the oppression that women face as a result of honour systems takes different forms depending on their geographical location, the regional culture and their family’s socioeconomic status (Dobash and Dobash, 2000). For example, in some South Asian families women’s participation in professional and/or academic pursuits contributes to the family’s honour: in others, a sister or daughter who works outside the home is a source of shame. As such, gender role expectations vary widely, ranging from the extremely patriarchal to the comparatively egalitarian (Welchman and Hossain, 2005).

This is partly because South Asian communities are heterogeneous, though they are rarely recognised as such by non-Western societies: in fact, they are differentiated according to class, caste, lineage, religion, language and region, among other factors. Moreover, in the South Asian sub-continent issues relating to izzat are not confined to Pakistan or to Muslims, instead being prevalent throughout the region, including among Hindus and Sikhs. Furthermore, while some members of the many social groups that value the notion of honour engage in acts of violence, many more do not; the idea that all members of such groups are involved in HBV stems from the type of Orientalist representations that this article specifically seeks to repudiate.

Of greater importance than identifying the specific acts associated with honour and shame in a given community is the fact that nearly all victims of HBV are (young) women, while perpetrators are typically the victim’s blood relatives or in-laws. Although women, especially mothers and mothers-in-law, may be involved in the perpetration of HBV, it is usually men who carry out the violence: assailants are most commonly the victim’s father, brother(s) and/or uncle(s). This is largely because HBV, including so-called ‘honour’ killings, provide a public display of patriarchal power. As Bourdieu (1977) claims, honour is always lived out openly, before other people; in many countries where ‘honour’ killings occur regularly, perpetrators who are arrested proudly display their handcuffs because killing for the sake of individual or collective honour is generally viewed as heroic. In such situations, men are considered to be victims of their circumstances: their crimes are seen as impulsive rather than premediated. This gendered explanation locates the propensity for violence not in men per se but rather in culturally constituted ways of ‘being a man’ that link masculinity with aggression (Hearn, 2004), not least because the exercise of complete control over female relatives is viewed as a masculine virtue (Ertürk, 2012).

Orientalist frameworks understand HBV as a manifestation of the ‘culture clash’ between immigrant cultures and Western culture. Thus, in the post-9/11 climate, discussions of ‘honour’ killings have been associated with the condemnation of Islam and the backward ‘other’ (Sen, 2005), drawing attention not to how HBV relates to other forms of violence against women (VAW) but to culture itself.

The term ‘culture’ derives from the Latin cultura, meaning ‘cultivation’. The poet and essayist Mathew Arnold (1869, cited in Young, 1995) used the concept to refer to an ideal of refinement: the ‘best that has been thought and said in the world’. Culture often connotes improvements in the position of individuals and groups, especially through education: in other words, the development of civilisation. In metropolitan societies, the term encompasses practices such as art, classical music and haute cuisine (i.e. ‘high culture’), which differentiate it from rural and working-class culture (i.e. ‘low culture’). Indeed, the development of the concept played a key role in both class differentiation in Britain and the inscription of racialised colonial modalities abroad (Young, 1995): the cultures of both non-elite and overseas societies have traditionally been regarded as subordinate to dominant and/or ‘home’ cultures. During colonialism, ideas of ‘civilised’ metropolitan and ‘uncivilised’ colonised cultures were elaborated and contested as signifiers of the conflict between colonial powers and their subjects.

Current understandings of HBV are marked by similar colonial and postcolonial processes. As Purna Sen (2005) argues, Europe also has a long history of ‘honour’-based norms and traditions, especially in relation to medieval codes of chivalry and nobility. For instance, duelling between men was once considered necessary, in some circumstances, to protect women’s ‘honour’, as well as being a way of seeking their favour. In Britain, the concept is alive in the ‘honour system’ whereby the monarch bestows titles as rewards for distinguished service. Similarly, the Scouts and Guides require members to take ‘honour oaths’. In these contexts, ‘honour’ has positive connotations. However, when applied to South Asian societies and diasporic communities the concept is likely to be recast through Orientalist tropes and imbued with notions about the West’s moral superiority.

South Asian (and especially Muslim) cultural practices are often represented as pernicious and inherently uncivilised. The figure of the Muslim woman as downtrodden under the weight of Muslim patriarchal practices is particularly prevalent. Indeed, one of America’s justifications for going to war with Iraq and Afghanistan was, ostensibly, to protect Muslim women from sexual discrimination (Al-Ali, 2011; Eisenstein, 2007). Razack (2008) argues that post-9/11 discourses of Eastern tradition and Western modernity have been regularly contested on the body of the Muslim woman: that is to say, Muslim women’s bodies have collectively come to be considered a yardstick with which to gauge a society’s relationship to modernity (Razack, 2008: 96). Thus, Western women are seen as modern, civilised and democratic in opposition to ‘othered’ Muslim women, who are seen as pre-modern, tribal and non-democratic (Razack, 2008: 84). According to Razack (2008: 104), assertions of being ‘the same as, but culturally different from, Muslim women’ enables Western women to proclaim both their autonomy and their superiority, not only over Muslim women but Muslims in general. Through such processes, even feminist responses to the ‘other’ may be harnessed for neo-imperialistic purposes (Razack, 2008). Kelly (2013: 6) suggests that one outcome of this ‘way of seeing’ is that the same form of violence is explained differently depending on whether the victim and/or perpetrator(s) come from majority or minority cultures.

Ertürk (2012) suggests that these notions became particularly prevalent post-9/11 because the ‘women issue’ has been subsumed within a rhetoric about the ‘clash of civilizations’, which sees current international relationships as structured around cultural and religious divisions. Thus, one of the unintended outcomes of the recent focus on the rights of Third World and immigrant/minority women has been the return to Orientalist narratives that define these women as victims of deviant and essentially misogynous cultures. This suggests that women of the Global South face additional challenges in their lives, in turn implying that there can be no effective global movement to tackle the issue of women’s rights from a universal human perspective (Ertürk, 2012). Moreover, stereotyping non-Western cultures as the ultimate cause of VAW normalises the patriarchal structures that constrain Western women. It also ignores the asymmetrical power relations, tensions and conflict between Western and non-Western states (and the role of both state-level policy and the neoliberal economic environment) in perpetuating gendered and racialised hierarchies.

In the West, research on Pakistani women continues to rely on Orientalist explanations of these women’s struggles, implicating both the family and the community as institutions of oppression. Representations of Muslim women as either entrapped by the oppressive patriarchal structures of Islamic traditions (or emancipated from such fetters when they deny them) are prevalent. These representations emanate from the position of Muslim women in broad social schemas revolving around the assumption that there is binary opposition between Islamic absolutism on the one hand and the ‘civilising’ mission of neo-colonialists and neo-Orientalists on the other. Visible signs of faith (e.g. the veil) are seen as symbolic of Muslim women’s fate as anonymous, passive victims: the refusal to veil, conversely, is seen to denote a woman’s secular values, marking her as liberated through exposure to Western doctrines of modernity. As Edward Said (1978: xviii) argues, Orientalist discourses have ‘viewed Muslims through the prism of religion. Islam has been seen as a static, monolithic and backward doctrine that both explains and determines Muslim behaviour’.

This is the wider context in which representations of Shafilea Ahmed’s murder by her parents have come to be articulated. The impact of Orientalist discourses on current responses to HBV demonstrates that vigilance is required if neo-imperial projects are not to gain hegemony under the guise of anti-patriarchal rhetoric: both HBV and Orientalist discourses must be condemned.

The murder of Shafilea Ahmed

Was Shafilea Ahmed’s murder an ‘honour’ killing? This question is not as straightforward to answer as it seems. In the early stages, the police refrained from describing the case as involving HBV in order to set their investigation apart from the many stereotypes that link HBV with South Asian communities. Instead, they represented it as a case of domestic violence in which some members of the family exhibited pathological characteristics. However, even this nuanced assessment does not tell the whole story: as the following detailed case summary shows, issues of izzat clearly played an important part in Shafilea’s death.

Shafilea Ahmed was born in Bradford on 14 July 1986, shortly after her parents emigrated from Pakistan. She was the oldest of five children. The body of evidence suggests that, in the year prior to Shafilea’s disappearance in September 2003, there was significant tension between Shafilea and her parents, deriving primarily from a clash between the values held by Shafilea’s parents and Shafilea’s own, in their view, Western values. One of her parents’ complaints was that Shafilea had a wide circle of friends, most of them from her school, which reflected the local community: a small percentage of the school’s students come from minority ethnic backgrounds, but most are white.

Moreover, Shafilea’s parents appear to have discussed an arranged marriage for Shafilea, though statements by Shafilea’s friends, teachers and sister Alesha indicate that Shafilea was firmly against such a marriage. The evidence indicates that Shafilea was very concerned that she might be forced into marriage when her father took her out of school for a family trip to Pakistan in spring 2003. The trip was cut short when Shafilea swallowed bleach (or a similar caustic liquid) in early May and required treatment at a local hospital. Shafilea’s mother later told police that Shafilea had accidentally ingested the bleach, mistaking it for mouthwash in one of the unfamiliar outside toilets prevalent in Pakistan. However, medical opinion was that there was no mouth injury consistent with the action of gargling mouthwash; instead, the injury was consistent with a deliberate act of swallowing.

On 11 May 2003, Shafilea and Alesha (the second oldest child) were left alone in Pakistan, the rest of the family having returned to Britain. In subsequent police interviews, both parents stated that, at the time of their departure from Pakistan, Shafilea was physically well and wanted to remain there. However, when Shafilea flew home from Pakistan on 27 May she was immediately taken by ambulance to Warrington hospital. She was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit where she spent 10 weeks being treated for a serious injury to her throat. Following this, she required regular outpatient treatment for severe stricture of the lower oesophagus, without which she was unable to swallow. Her doctors estimated that the maximum period she would be able to survive without these regular treatments was approximately six weeks. Determined to further her education, as she aspired to be a lawyer, 17-year-old Shafilea commenced a series of college courses in September 2003, despite her illness.

She was last seen alive on 11 September 2003, though she was due to attend hospital the following day for treatment. On the evening of her disappearance, Shafilea worked at her part-time job until 9 p.m., when she was seen leaving at the end of her shift by another employee. She spent the evening at the family home in Warrington with her parents and four siblings. Her father claims that she was alive when, with the rest of the family apart from Shafilea already asleep, he went to bed at 11 p.m. However, it was a former teacher from Shafilea’s secondary school who reported her missing on the afternoon of 18 September 2003.

The initial police investigation into Shafilea’s disappearance was extensive. At the time, the two main sources of information were (1) Shafilea’s family and (2) her friends and teachers. Significant inconsistencies between these two sources soon emerged. Investigations revealed a history of school, social service and law enforcement involvement with Shafilea and her family, starting when she began secondary school and continuing until her disappearance. The information given by Shafilea’s school and friends catalogued a series of events evidencing the conflict between Shafilea and her parents, the abuse Shafilea had suffered at their hands, and the fact that she had run away from home on two occasions: in 2003 she was even granted support by social services to live independently. For these reasons, the circumstances under which Shafilea disappeared during the night of 11 September were treated as suspicious. In December 2003, Shafilea’s parents were arrested on suspicion of abduction. Both were interviewed under caution. They denied any involvement in their daughter’s disappearance and were released on police bail. When interviewed by reporters, the Ahmeds claimed that they were victims of racism; however, many reporters suggested that these claims were invented to divert attention from their unwillingness to talk about Shafilea (BBC Newsnight, 2004).

On 4 February 2004, the decomposed remains of a human body were found on the banks of the River Kent near Force Bridge in Sedgewick. Due to the condition of the body, identification was initially frustrated. However, a DNA match to Shafilea was made on 23 February 2004. A post-mortem examination by a Home Office pathologist found that it was impossible to ascertain an exact cause of death due to the level of decomposition. However, the pathologist’s opinion was that Shafilea had died an unnatural death. She concluded that the most likely cause of death was smothering or strangulation. Scientific evidence from experts in anthropology, entomology and botany, combined with witness evidence from the scene, indicated that Shafilea’s body had been deposited on the riverbank shortly after her death and that her body had remained in that location since September or October 2003. As a result of these findings, the police launched a murder enquiry.

Shafiela’s parents gave a number of press interviews in March 2004, including one for Newsnight that was broadcast on 2 March 2004. Mrs Ahmed remained silent throughout the interview, first looking directly at the interviewer and then staring ahead or at her lap. At no point did Mr Ahmed seem at a loss for words. He appeared attentive and focused, rather than noticeably distraught, while answering questions about Shafilea’s disappearance. Throughout the short interview he referred to Shafilea as ‘the daughter’ or ‘the girl’. When the interviewer asked about Shafilea’s suicide attempt, he stated that his daughter ‘took a sip’ of poisonous liquid; this directly contradicts the medical evidence.

‘I’m not a strict parent in any way whatsoever, right. I’m as English as anybody can picture me, right. But obviously the police portrayal of me is different … we have not been treated fairly’, Mr Ahmed claimed. He complained that his family was misunderstood by both the police and the public. Throughout the interview, he maintained that he was hurt that anyone could even suspect that he and his family might be responsible for the death of ‘the girl’; his anger and hurt appeared focused less on the loss of his daughter and more on what he perceived as the unfair treatment he and his family had received. To this end, rather than making a plea to the persons responsible for his daughter’s death, he defended his Englishness (Gill, 2014).

A comprehensive file of evidence was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service to determine whether further action against Shafilea’s parents should be taken. On 4 August 2006, Mr Robin Spencer QC advised the police that there was insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. However, in January 2008 a coroner’s inquest into the circumstances of Shafilea’s death found that she had been unlawfully killed.

On 27 August 2010, Alesha Ahmed, Shafilea’s sister, was in the custody of Cheshire Police on suspicion of having arranged a robbery at her parents’ house. She requested to speak to officers about another matter; following her release, she was interviewed (with her solicitor present) by other officers from Cheshire Police. Alesha claimed that she (and her three surviving siblings) witnessed their parents kill Shafilea on 11 September 2003. Alesha’s testimony represented the ‘missing piece’ of the puzzle in terms of the Crown Prosecution Service’s ability to make a convincing case against Shafilea’s parents. In September 2011, both were charged with Shafilea’s murder. Their trial commenced on 21 May 2012. On 3 August 2012, both were convicted and received life sentences.

Cultural predicaments

The Ahmed family lived in a context that was simultaneously British and Pakistani: what Homi Bhabha (1994) calls a ‘third space’. This applied to both generations, albeit in different ways. The patriarchal gender system that Shafilea was ensnared in was not comprised simply of the ‘backward’ rural culture of the Ahmeds’ home standing in stark opposition to the enlightened culture of British society outside the Ahmed home. Instead, Shafilea lived her life in and through both the British patriarchal values to which all women in Britain are subject and also the patriarchal values of her parents’ rural Pakistani upbringing.

To think about culture is to address the whole spectrum of experiences and modes of thinking, feeling and behaving – as well as the values, customs and traditions – of relevant social formations. Since each social formation is intersected by gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion and sexuality, as well individual biographies and group histories, cultures can be seen as mutually constitutive psychosocial phenomena that represent intersectionally configured locations. Migrants do not carry culture like baggage. Rather, the traces of their intersectionally configured cultures of origin are brought into negotiation with the intersectionally configured cultures they encounter in their country of destination. Thus, the children of Pakistani parents are socialised into Western cultural practices (particularly at school) but they are also influenced by Pakistani cultural practices through their upbringing at home (e.g. through the family’s observance of South Asian Muslim customs and rituals, as well as their choices regarding films, music and fashion).

These processes of cultural ‘creolisation’ (Grillo, 2003) create new discursive and psychosocial subjects driven by conflicting impetuses that result in both continuity and change: migrant parents may be invested with certain cultural traces from their homelands, but they must also adapt to their new location. Mr Ahmed’s defence of his ‘Englishness’ is particularly interesting in this context: his own implicit claims that he was sufficiently influenced by local cultural practices to consider himself English indicates that his actions were not simply the result of cultural conflict (Brah, 1996). Indeed, Mr Ahmed had been married before to a Danish woman, with whom he had a child (Keaveny, 2012) and with whom he had led a ‘creolised-western’ lifestyle (Grillo, 2003).

It is not only immigrant parents but also their children who must negotiate their intersectionally configured locations. Thus, while families may share a common ethos, individual members often express and experience this ethos differently. The fact that the different members of the Ahmed family do not occupy a single, shared intersectionally configured location helps to explain why the Ahmed children reacted in different ways to Shafilea’s murder.

For instance, when cross-examined by Tom Bayliss QC, the defence lawyer for her parents, Alesha claimed that she had lied in her initial police statements about Shafilea’s disappearance because she was ‘covering up for her parents’ (R v Iftikhar Ahmed and Farzana Ahmed). She went on to explain that she had been ‘torn’ between Shafilea and her parents: ‘I’ve got my sister who died on one side and my parents, who I care about, on the other’ (Gill, 2012, personal notes from observation of court case). Alesha’s three surviving siblings also gave evidence at the trial. Her youngest sister, who was seven at the time of Shafilea’s disappearance, told the jury that she did not remember the events of 11 September 2003. Although Mehvish (Shafilea’s second youngest sister) claimed that her parents were not involved in Shafilea’s death, the prosecution read out an account of Shafilea’s murder that a friend claimed that Mehvish, then aged 12, had given in 2003. The prosecution also showed the court letters by Mehvish they claimed were about Shafilea’s death. When cross-examined about these documents, Mehvish said that she did not regret writing them as the contents were ‘just a story’.

Language is central to understanding culture and subjectivity. From both Saussurian and post-Saussurian perspectives, language is a signifying process that represents a way of differentiating things and also relating them to each another in order to produce meaning: as such, meaning is differential rather than referential in that the meaning of signs is not intrinsic but relational, with each sign deriving meaning from how distinct it is from other signs. Thus, language is the site where both the subject and subjectivity emerge. Postcolonial critiques of humanist conceptions of the subject (which assert the presence of a unified, unitary, rational ‘point of origin’ centred in consciousness) question the view that consciousness is the origin of subjectivity, treating it instead as the result of signification and signifying processes (Belsey, 2012; Weedon, 1987). Psychoanalytic critiques make similar points by foregrounding the importance of the inner world, which is permeated by fantasy, conflict, emotions and non-rational and unruly responses. As a result, subjectivity is both precarious and contradictory. Jacqueline Rose, writing in The Guardian (5 August 2012: 22) about the Ahmed trial, argued that,

Missing in the court room, in pretty much any court room, is the idea of fantasy, of how we make our lives bearable by elaborating stories about ourselves. For both Alesha and Me[h]vish lying was a way to survive. If, in the judges [sic] own words, this case has been ‘extraordinary’, it is not least by bringing these contortions of the inner world, the agonies of attachment and belonging, so painful [sic] to life.

Representations of HBV and VAW

Shafilea’s case highlights the fact that while ‘honour’ is an important motivating factor in most ‘honour’ killings, it is rarely the only issue at stake. When the media invoked cultural clash to explain Mr and Mrs Ahmed’s actions, they ignored the fact that not all immigrant parents from rural Pakistan are murderers: dysfunctional family dynamics were also centrally at stake.

British print and television media have accorded disproportionate and increasing attention to crime over the last four decades, focusing especially on individual criminal incidents and their victims, rather than on patterns of crime or possible causal factors (Beckett and Sasson, 2000). Shoemaker and Reese (1996) and Benedict (1992) have identified the core sociopolitical and practical factors that affect the framing of news stories about crimes committed against women; these include conceptions of ‘what sells’, journalistic traditions, racism, sexism, class prejudices, sources’ biases and organisational pressures and constraints.

Mirroring press coverage of crime in general, reporting on VAW has increased since the 1980s; however, media representations of VAW and its victims continue to reflect dominant social attitudes towards women and, thus, serve to perpetuate gender inequalities (Berns, 2004; Taylor, 2008). Media accounts of domestic violence typically exclude the concept of male accountability in favour of focusing on victims, who are variously (1) celebrated for having the courage to leave abusive relationships, (2) accused of instigating the abuse and/or (3) held responsible for not escaping their predicament (Berns, 2004). Berns warns that although some of these framing devices have helped to foster support for victims through the development of legislation and the funding of shelters, they have not helped to ‘develop public understanding of the social context of violence and may impede social change that could prevent violence’ (Berns, 2004: 3). Razack argues that this is because the British press renders narratives about ‘honour’ killings palatable by depicting these crimes as the work of a few ‘bad apples’ (Razack, 2004: 6), rather than as part of a systemic social problem that requires more nuanced analysis.

Narayan (1997: 85) claims that Westerners retrieve information about ‘others across borders’ by focusing on simple facts; thus, information is edited and filtered, often adhering to, rather than disrupting, assumptions about the relevant ‘other’. This can be observed with regard to the construction of dowry murders as a sub-type of HBV connected specifically to Indian culture: Narayan (1997: 104) argues that,

The reference to ‘culture’ in these reports [about dowry murders] can combine with more ‘free floating’ ideas about ‘Third World backwardness’ and the tendency to think of the Third World as realms of ‘Very Other Cultures’ to make ‘foreign phenomenon’ [sic] seem comfortably intelligible while preserving their ‘foreignness’.

Similar processes can be seen in relation to honour killings. Scanning nearly 1414 news items covering the period September 2003 to October 2012 reveals interesting patterns regarding how Shafilea’s murder was reported. The crime was commonly described as an ‘honour’ killing, despite the problematic nature of the term. Critically, it plays into a common framing device that encodes murders committed by members of minority ethnic communities as deriving from these communities’ inferior cultural traditions and norms. Even though ‘honour’ killings are found across a wide range of ethnic and religious groups, the British media has sought to render the practice intelligible through references to the ‘Muslim-ness’ of HBV, notions of Asian ‘backwardness’ and ‘barbarism’, the prevalence of human rights atrocities against women in Pakistan, and discourses about primitive manifestations of masculinity based on notions of honour and shame. These simplistic explanations maintain the distinctiveness of HBV from forms of VAW common in other (i.e. white) British communities. However, as Jacqueline Rose, writing in The Guardian (5 August 2012: 22) argues, each week in England and Wales two women are murdered by men in domestic confrontations. Although these incidents are likely to be described as ‘crimes of passion’, the context is comparable to that of Shafilea’s murder: these crimes are perpetrated by persons with whom the victim has intimate ties.

Representations of ‘honour’ killings that view South Asian culture as the key causal factor are permeated with discursive strategies associated with moral panics: perpetrators of these crimes are labelled ‘deviant’, and the problem of HBV is seen as pervasive among such deviants – in this case, among all Muslims. In contrast, reports about domestic violence in white communities generally do not construct the problem as particularly widespread or even particularly disreputable (Berns, 2004). Indeed, despite persistently high rates of domestic violence, the problem is usually cast as an aberration in white communities. Meanwhile, specific forms of domestic violence common in minority communities tend to be depicted as the norm in these ‘deviant’ communities.

The case of the fatal May 2012 house-fire involving the Philpottt family not only revealed the story behind the deaths of six children, for which their father was convicted of manslaughter in 2013, but also brought to light the domestic violence perpetrated by Mick Philpott against his female partners. Both Philpott’s wife and girlfriend worked, but their money and benefits were paid into his bank account. Moreover, they were not allowed to go out shopping on their own and were driven to work by Philpott; indeed, they did not have keys to the house and had to ask his permission to leave. In these ways, Philpott tried to control every element of their lives. When his girlfriend fled to a refuge, Philpott decided to take revenge by framing her for arson, hence the house-fire in which six of his children died. The case highlights how a father’s jealous desire for control over his children and their mothers can lead to violence and even death (Hallam, 2013). It also raises questions about how the case would have been framed if the Philpotts were an Asian family, especially given that the nature of the interpersonal violence between the adults in the Philpott home was not named at all by many commentators (Neate, 2013). There were no moral panics about Philpott’s attempt to totally control the lives (including their physical movements) of his wife and girlfriend or about his culture and tradition, as if violent acts perpetrated by white individuals exist outside culture.

Thus, whereas ‘mainstream’ forms of domestic violence are generally represented through discourses focused on the individuals involved, the majority of news stories about HBV employ framing devices centred on the cultural difference of perpetrators of this form of violence. As such, the media’s framing of ‘honour’ killing contributes to the perception that culturally specific forms of violence are more abhorrent than ‘normal’ domestic violence and that they are rightfully subject to media-driven moral crusades.

Singling out HBV as a particularly barbaric form of VAW not only trivialises ‘mainstream’ forms of domestic abuse, but also locates ‘honour’ in an othered, unchanging, pre-modern world (Fernandez, 2009). These representations are not unique to the British media. Writing about the formulation of the term ‘harmful traditional practices’ by the United Nations (a victory of sorts for campaigners who sought recognition for the gendered harms that the United Nations had previously been silent on), Winter et al. (2002: 72) criticised the assumption that the ‘metropolitan centres of the West contain no “traditions” or “culture” harmful to women, and that the violence which does exist there is idiosyncratic and individualized rather than culturally condoned’. Ultimately, framing ‘honour’ killings and other forms of HBV as more dangerous than ‘mainstream’ forms of domestic violence restricts the scope of debates about possible solutions to these problems (Anitha and Gill, 2011).

Since acts of VAW in majority communities are perceived as resulting from the pathology of individual perpetrators (Berns, 2004), government attempts to tackle domestic violence have centred on punishing offenders through criminal justice responses, as in the Philpott case. Meanwhile, viewing cases of violence against minority ethnic women through the lens of the concept of ‘harmful cultural practices’ (Narayan, 1997; Razack, 2004; Volpp, 2000) has resulted in responses focused on effecting change in specific communities through ‘modernising’ their sociocultural values, norms and traditions – or, failing this, through employing stricter immigration controls ostensibly aimed at defending minority women’s rights. Women’s groups in Britain have been critical of successive governments’ focus on criminal justice responses to the detriment of efforts to address the broader social problems at stake. Indeed, the lack of attention to developing effective preventive strategies has been described as the ‘weakest part of the UK’s responses to VAW’ (Coy et al., 2008: 6).

In November 2009, when domestic violence education was proposed as one possible response to VAW, a number of British newspapers were highly critical of the approach; articles in right-wing newspapers sought to minimise both the prevalence of domestic violence and the need for preventive education in majority communities, while simultaneously stressing that domestic violence (particularly HBV) in minority communities was the ‘real’ problem. According to these articles, such forms of VAW require preventive initiatives aimed at tackling minority communities’ problematic cultures. A 2009 article with the headline ‘Honour based violence is biggest problem facing women’ (Whitehead, 2009) cited David Green, director of Civitas (an independent think tank), in arguing that the strategy was ‘skirting around the edges’ of the real problem:

One of the dangers of having lessons to teach everyone from a certain age that it is wrong to use violence against women is that it implies that all men are a potential menace, but that is not the problem we face.

This statement completely ignores the fact that domestic violence and child abuse happen across cultures and ethnicities.

The other side of the coin is a common, though unintended, consequence of positive principles that seek to ensure that cultural differences are respected: measures aimed at promoting multiculturalism are often applied in ways that fail to interrogate problematic cultural norms and values. Thus, in trying to be sensitive to cultural diversity, British policy-makers and practitioners sometimes allow cultural norms and traditions to pass uncontested even when they are in direct conflict with fundamental human rights (Phillips, 2010). Recently, however, Britain has begun to discuss the circumstances under which the state should intervene in the sociocultural practices and traditions of minority communities (Phillips, 2010).

Moving forwards, it will be important to strike a balance between failing to challenge cultural values that are in conflict with human rights and condemning cultures wholesale for specific practices. The police refused to call Shafilea’s murder an ‘honour killing’ precisely because they wanted to stress that no licence should be granted to those who claim that their cultural rights excuse acts of brutality. This is a step in the right direction. At the same time, those charged with protecting the public must be able to identify and understand the risk factors associated with all forms of VAW so that they can respond effectively. Such an understanding is only possible if, instead of talking purely about culture, debates about HBV and VAW explore the intersection of culture with gender and other axes of differentiation: it is a question of inequality, not just of culture.

Conclusion

Forms of violence experienced primarily by black and minority ethnic women were neglected in both academic literature and policy debates until recently: now they are often hyper-visible without necessarily being well understood. Traditionally, domestic violence was constructed as primarily perpetrated by partners and ex-partners: now increasing attention is being directed to forms of VAW committed by relatives from the wider kin-group, rather than just the immediate family. Although cultural specificities must be recognised, this does not mean that minority cultures should be blamed for HBV or other forms of VAW: there is a difference between wholesale condemnation of the culture of a specific social group and condemnation of the harmful, illegal practices of members of that social group.

Understanding the violence experienced by minority ethnic women in Britain requires an approach that takes account of the continuities between different forms of gender-based violence while also addressing the specificity of particular forms, such as HBV (Sen, 2005). The causal factors behind Shafilea Ahmed’s murder were far more complex than the British media’s tale of backward parents and progressive British society suggests. The home figures as the site of murder across all sections of British society far more often than the media – and the majority of Britons – acknowledge. Looking ahead, it will be important to address the harmful effects of patriarchal cultural practices, no matter which culture they are associated with: Shafilea’s tragedy is simultaneously that of one woman and that of all women. Ultimately, preventing future tragedies will only be possible if the current focus on culture is replaced by a more complex, nuanced understanding of the issues at stake: one that looks at the various types of inequality that lie behind not just ‘honour’-based violence but all forms of violence against women.