Abstract
So-called ‘honour’ crimes – in which the victim, often a young woman, is abused or killed by one or more relatives from her natal family, with the justification of restoring reputation to the family – have become a contemporary preoccupation. This is particularly visible in European states coming to terms with diversity, where these crimes are often casually associated with Islam, even though many Muslim communities (such as those in the Former Soviet Union and South-East Asia) have a low tolerance for such crimes, and similar crimes are found among non-Muslim groups (such as in the Mediterranean in recent history and present-day India).
In the UK, two murders have disproportionately shaped the British conception of ‘honour’-based violence (HBV). First, Heshu Yones, a teenager murdered by her father was the first to be described as an ‘honour’ killing by the British police in 2003. This crime was complicated by the judge’s reduction of the tariff on the basis of the perpetrator’s cultural background and the ‘provocation’ of Heshu’s behaviour. This decision raised the ire of Kurdish feminists, who pointed out that this insinuated a differential value upon the lives of women based on their families’ attitudes and that the implication that the perpetrator’s values reflected those of the wider Kurdish community was presumptuous and essentialist. Second, in 2005, Banaz Mahmod, a murder victim whose numerous and unsuccessful attempts to alert police to a family conspiracy to take her life indicated the Met’s failure to comprehend HBV, creating a press scandal. Both of these victims, and their killers, had been born in the region that Alinia refers to as Iraqi Kurdistan, a small, semi-autonomous quasi-state in Northern Iraq. The trend to culturalize such crimes, made clear in Heshu’s case, have the potential to locate HBV not merely as ethnocultural but particularly Kurdish in nature.
For Alinia, this culturalization of HBV provides a ‘megaphone’ for murderers (p. 47), wherein the values of perpetrators of crimes who claim a ‘cultural’ motivation become available to pathologize an entire ethnic group, and muffle alternative voices. Alinia does not reduce or diminish women’s experiences of violence, nor the galvanizing power of reputation within certain communities within Iraqi Kurdistan. Her qualitative interviews depict both the desolation of women and girls confined to shelters to protect them from their fathers, brothers and other relatives, and their counterparts: murderers who remain self-righteous and indignant that they have been imprisoned at all. These are powerful testimonies, although indications of her research questions and a better idea of sampling size and methodology would have given a greater indication of their generalizability.
Challenging the idea of a unified culture, she devotes a chapter to the activities of Kurdish human rights activists who have established shelters across the region and lobbied for over a decade for political changes to reduce violence against women. It is due to these efforts that the Kurdistan region, unlike the rest of Iraq, removed the provision for reduced sentencing in so-called ‘honour’ killings between 2002 and 2004. These voices disrupt any conception of a single, static and irredeemably violent culture of ‘honour’, showing a more complex and contested landscape. Alinia situates these actors within a modern political context in which the ‘woman question’ has become a site of intense contestation, and where conservative blocs, quasi-tribal and religious in nature, have become unduly influential. These blocs, she identifies, have a long association with local and colonial power-brokers, and claim religion, ‘culture’ and tradition in order to shore up patriarchal power. They may not, she identifies, reflect the values of an increasingly youthful and urban demographic.
HBV, as she identifies, is used to police gender roles, particularly normative femininity, within a social order where certain groups require women to serve as repositories of biological and reproductive integrity, obliged to produce the ‘right kind’ of children, meaning those which further the family’s interest in maintaining group and kinship solidarities, and which express the continuance of identity groupings. She contextualizes this within a wider setting, in which the policing of gender and reproduction forms an aspect of the policing of agnatic, faith and ethnic boundaries; boundaries which, she points out, have been sharpened by the region’s tragic history and the process of state building. Alinia’s expansive intersectionalism is the key development in the study of HBV that this work exhibits; while gender remains at the heart of her analysis, this is contextualized within a multi-layered socio-political contextualization of the region. Forced marriage appears, from her findings, to be particularly prominent in the experiences of victims of HBV. Where young people reject parental marriage arrangement and the demands of the sex-gender system, Alinia identifies that they confront: ‘a whole system of knowledge, power and domination that has emerged in the intersecting violence of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and generation in a historical context permeated by colonialism, brutal ethnic and national oppression, poverty and mass violence’ (p. 126).
This explanation holds great promise for further exploration, resonating with the opinions of Indian scholars, such as Prem Chowdhry (2007), which relate ‘honour’ to the familial control of relationships which cross boundaries of caste. This tends to suggest that this form of violence is an aspect of social relations located in relations of kinship, and the mechanisms which situate marriage as a very significant aspect of inter-group relations. To define ‘honour’ as ‘cultural’ thus excludes critics of the system from their own cultures, and masks the political and social dimensions of gendered violence. Within pluralist societies, it prioritizes the perpetrators’ understandings over those of the victims, meaning that crimes may be tolerated (at the victims’ expense), used as an argument for assimilationist policies, and co-opted into xenophobic discourse. Alinia’s work provides a vital counter to these positions, and gestures towards an alternative, contextualized understanding. It is recommended to scholars with an interest in the topics of gender-based violence, identities, violence within the family and multiculturalism at all levels.