generalspeaking

"Honour" Restored

Surely it is only the most primitive, religion-soiled minds who can conceive of restoring honour - a truly peculiar concept at best - by taking the life of someone who has offended a social moral code. Somehow it is not entirely surprising that generally speaking it is women and girls who stand a chance of losing their lives because society has deemed their offence so egregious, their flouting of social convention so unacceptable, that they must pay for their transgression with their lives.

This has got to represent a primitive, miserable, misogynous society at its very worst. Women flogged for dressing inappropriately, for being seen in public with a man, for attempting to assert her individuality or human rights. Girls accused of leading men into acts of sordid sexual violence against them, because of something they did, or garments they wore or failed to wear. Young women professing love for a man outside their clan or tribe or religion, destined to die.

Occasionally a woman is tortured and put to death by a village religious council. This serves as a warning to other women or girls that they must not transgress their village's, their society's norms on gruesome pain of death. Most often women and girls are murdered by their close relatives; fathers, brothers, uncles - in ancient rituals of honour-restoration. And the general society is accepting of these atrocities.

Honour killings can occur in societies that practise religions other than Islam, but most honour killings occur within Islamic societies. It is often enough said that Islam does not encourage such extremes of punishment for social infractions. That these practises are social traditions within clans and tribes for whom restorative honour, the outward manifestation of tending to one's good name, has nothing to do with Islam.

Another girl child has been chastised by her livid guardians. Furious that she enjoyed friendships with boys. So the father and the grandfather of a sixteen year old girl, Medine Memi, now stand accused of murder in her dreadful death. The girl had tried repeatedly to convince police that she had been beaten by her father and grandfather, and on each such occasion nothing was done. And then she was murdered.

"She tried to take refuge at the police station three times, and she was sent home three times" said her mother Immihan, when her child's body was discovered. Turkish media claim her grandfather had been under investigation after the child lodged her complaint. This obviously did not help her. Her body was found bound into a sitting position in a two-metre hole outside the family's house in Kahta in southeast Turkey.

She suddenly disappeared, and was found 40 days later. "The report is blood curdling. According to our findings the girl - who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood -was alive and fully conscious when she was buried", according to one official. The hole she had been placed within was cemented over. She was buried while conscious as a post-mortem concluded, taking note of the soil in her lungs and stomach.

Her death is presumed to have been slow and agonizing.

Labels: Human Rights, Religion, Traditions

posted by Pieface @ Friday, February 05, 2010