ABSTRACT
Family honor violence is the use of physical force against a family member for undermining the family’s good name or honor. Typically, the targets are young women accused or suspected of misbehavior, often sexual in nature, while the perpetrators are fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, or other family members. Family honor violence has a long history but today is concentrated in a band of countries stretching from northwest Africa to southeast Asia and among emigrants from such countries. When and why does it occur? To answer these and related questions, I enlist the help of a theory of moral conflict developed by the sociologist Donald Black. Although criminalized by the state, family honor violence, to the parties involved, is social control – a response to wrongdoing: the person beaten or killed is an offender while the person who beats or kills is a victim. This is not to condone the violence, but, rather, to assert that the best starting point for developing a theory of family honor violence – a theory that explains who commits it against whom, and when – is to treat it not as the committing of official crime but as the punishment of unofficial crime.
