Death by family: Honor violence as punishment

Abstract

Occurring in a broad range of non-western and western countries, violence committed against women in the name of family honor has been viewed in several ways, including as a crime, as gendered violence, or as a violation of human rights. But from a purely explanatory point of view, family honor violence is most profitably viewed as a type of social control, specifically penal social control. As punishment, honor violence appears to obey the same principles as other forms of punishment. Drawing on the theoretical strategy of pure sociology, the present article highlights two such principles: punishment increases with the social distance and social inferiority of the offender. These twin principles help to explain a broad range of facts about when and where family honor violence will occur, and how severe -in particular, how lethal -it will be. Keywords family punishment, honor violence, violence against womenPunishment is of two principal types: legal and non-legal. Of the two, legal punishment administered by state officials attracts the lion's share of scholarly and popular attention. Yet informal punishment is surely far more frequent. For every person fined, placed on probation, incarcerated, or executed many more are likely scolded, deprived of goods or services, have their pocket money or pay docked, placed in time out, sent to the Principal's office, demoted, fired, assigned unpleasant tasks, shunned, jeered, expelled, or beaten. The disproportionate emphasis is understandable -legal punishment is more public and better documented. But it is not justifiable: the study of punishment cannot privilege one form over another. The present article seeks to provide some balance by addressing the social conditions underlying an increasingly prominent (though not necessarily increasingly

Honour, Violence and Heteronormativity

“…Just as there has been an extended and sustained critique of the motivational impulse of 'hate' in hate crimes, 6 the use of 'honour' as an explanatory or taxonomic device in HBV has emerged as a critical point of debate in this newly-emerging field of enquiry (Baker et al 1999;Cooney 2014;Gill 2008;Gill and Brah 2014;Payton 2014;Roberts, Campbell and Lloyd 2014). Honour can be a positive individual attribute and a negative social resource but, in discussions of HBV, a primary distinction is made between the 'status' crimes of individualised interpersonal violence (such as intimate partner violence) and the 'honour' crimes of collective familial violence (such as HBV).…”

“…Homicide -even in the spontaneous violence of 'crimes of passion' or crimes of shame (Roberts, Campbell and Lloyd 2014) -is often preceded by a regime of incrementally more controlling and harmful punishments, leading in its criminal forms to grievous bodily harm such as acidification, infibulation or rape in marriage. Each of these punishments is designed to reinstate a sexual and gender order (Cooney 2014;Payton 2014).…”

“…Further, unlike conventional domestic, intimate-partner or family violence (and the majority of hate crimes reported to the London Metropolitan Police Service), these cases of intrafamilial hate crimes were also slightly more likely than racist hate crimes to include two or more offenders. These incidents -and arguably all hate crimes against gay men and lesbians -represent a form of collective (or social) punishment that mirrors the violence meted out to remedy a (perceived) transgression in sexual or gender codes of conduct in HBV cases (Asquith 2012a;Cooney 2014). When considered through these conceptual and empirical outliers, the efficacy of HBV exceptionalism is questionable, especially in light of its Islamophobic construction as a predominantly Muslim practice (Gill and Brah 2014 …”

“…But who is policed -and police gatekeeping at the point of complaintmaking -can fundamentally skew what is known about HBV. By its very nature, the criminal justice system is deployed by the state and victims when the behaviour under question is understood by both as sufficiently deviant or harmful to warrant more than social punishment (Cooney 2014). Who is recognised and thus subject to a specific set of risk assessments and service enhancements is shaped by not only the policy and practice contests within policing services (who counts in resource allocation), but also the shifting relationships between policing services and the communities of interest that move through the policing process (Asquith 2012b).…”

“…What can be known of gender and sexualitywhat can be accommodated within the heteronormative doxa -is socially constituted and institutionally embodied but it is given life in the minds and bodies of individuals who differentially wrestle with transgressions and reinscribe hetero-norms (Todd Weiss 2001 as they are to be lethal. Further, as these norms are the result of a continual social contestation, the collective pressure for violent action can be and is most often rejected (Cooney 2014), irrespective of differences in cultural expressions of heteronormativity.…”