ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the case of Shafilea Ahmed, a British-born woman of Pakistani origin who was murdered by her parents, in part because they believed she had committed cultural transgressions, including refusing to enter into an arranged marriage in Pakistan. The chapter analyses why cultural notions of ‘honour’, while important factors in this and similar cases, offer an insufficient explanation for murder – one that risks perpetuating harmful generalisations about ethnic minority groups. The complexity of the individual, family, social and cultural factors that lead to acts of ‘honour’-based violence must be properly understood in order for the criminal justice system to respond effectively to these crimes. Victims often experience intense feelings of shame in relation to perceived breaches of their own and their families’ ‘honour’, and are often reluctant to speak out if they experience violence perceived as necessary to ‘correct’ this ‘misbehaviour’; encouraging these women to report abuse is therefore no simple task. To achieve this aim, it is necessary to broaden understandings on the part of statutory agencies and policy makers that ‘honour’-based violence is only one form of gender-based violence and that it intersects with other family and cultural norms, as well as other forms of violence against women; only then will it be possible to improve practical and policy responses in order to prevent the murder of women and girls like Shafilea.
