ABSTRACT
Honor conflicts are a complicated mixture of compassion and aggression, sometimes even in the same incident and with the same parties. Despite its complexity, family honor violence can be explained with a trio of Blackian propositions. These testable propositions explain a multitude of facts about the causes and handling of honor conflicts, including when the woman is most likely to be executed by her family. Family honor violence is increasingly defined as criminal and immoral, a pattern consistent with Black’s theory of moral time. Still, conflicting views about family honor persist. Support remains robust among certain groups: large numbers of people, many of them young, continue to justify killing in the name of family honor. Yet a broad and multi-pronged social movement spanning national boundaries has emerged to provide support for individuals at risk of honor violence and to campaign for its elimination. Since family honor is founded on social, especially gender, inequality, it will, like all forms of entrenched inequality, not disappear without a struggle.
