ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the role of 'honour' in violence and killing of women by family members. It focuses on the nature and prevalence of such crimes, it considers how 'honour' is used to excuse men's violence against women and outlines the policing failures that contributed to the death of Banaz Mahmod. An 'honour' killing is the fatal arm of 'honour'-based violence. As with domestic violence, and until recently with forced marriage, there is no specific criminal offence of 'honour-based violence' and incidents are policed and prosecuted using generic offences that already exist such as homicide, rape, assault and harassment. Meetoo and Mirza argue that the concept of 'honour' is used to perpetuate violence against women that it is used by perpetrators as an excusing or mitigating factor when they commit such crimes. The chapter concludes that, without training, mistakes are likely to continue, as are the preventable deaths of women.
