| INTRODUCTION
Shahrzad Mojab – Nahla Abdo
News about violence against women at local, national, and international levels is increasing at an alarming and deeply disturbing rate. Recent reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others, depict an appalling picture of the situation of women in Afghanistan and Iraq under conditions of war and occupation (Human Rights Watch 2003a and 20036). There is a report about the execution of a sixteen-year-old Iranian girl whose crime was an extra-marrital relation; in Turkey, domestic violence is on the rise, and sexual violence against women in custody is well documented (Amnesty International 2003). We also read and hear daily about the violence of 'Wall' building by the state of Israel, which has made life especially difficult for women (see Ministry of Women's Affairs 2004).
Also, as we are writing this piece, we hear news about two French journalists taken hostage in Iraq with the demand that France abolish the ban on the wearing of the veil in public schools. The reports on violence against women in Africa, Latin America, and Asia provide a broader spectrum of sources and forms of violence, from the spread of poverty, starvation, and Hiv/Aids, to trafficking and trading young girls and women. Even under conditions of peace, such as in India and southeast Asia, femicide is now practiced widely (Russell and Harmes 2001; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2002).
If violence against women is on the rise, our knowledge about the conditions that generate this violence is also advancing visibly. Academic research has made great strides in documenting, theorizing, and interpreting this social phenomenon. There is, at the same time, increasing grass-roots activism against male violence. Women's shelters, as well as hotline services, for instance, are set up in many countries throughout the world. Many states are committed to combating male violence. Some states such as Canada offer refugee status to women who are oppressed in their countries. On the international level, too, there is considerable progress in the struggle against violence against women. For instance, the United Nations and the.
European Union have launched major initiatives including:
1. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, UN Document Series Symbol: ST/H/, UN Issuing Body: Secretariat Centre for Human Rights, Proclaimed by the General Assembly Resolution 48/104 of 20 December 1993;1
2. Working Towards the Elimination of Crimes Against Women Committed in the Name of Honour, United Nations S/57/179 General Assembly Distr.: General 30 January 2003 Fifty-Seventh session Agenda item 102 02 54997 Resolution adopted by the General Assembly;2
3. Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security;
4. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); and
5. So-Called 'Honour Crimes', Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly, Resolution 1327, 2003.3
In civil society, individuals and organizations are more aware than ever before about the gender war on women. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has been translated into many languages by lawyers, activists, and concerned citizens, and this declaration has been used for reforming oppressive gender relations.
If our knowledge is relatively adequate, if the state and the citizen are more conscious than ever before, and if there is action on the international level, why then is violence on the rise? The situation is a complex web of contradictions between consciousness and reality, knowledge and practice, the individual and the state, the agency and the institution, nationalism and feminism, religion and politics, and culture and politics. Resistance to change is, undoubtedly, made up of multiple factors and forces. First, the entrenched nature of patriarchy in all contemporary societies is underestimated. Patriarchy is often reduced to a 'wrong', uninformed, uneducated, or deviationist male attitude. A more complex approach would see it not as a psychological or individual problem, but rather a social and historical institution. It is the system or regime of the exercise of male gender power. The exercise of power is critical if only because gender relations are unequal, hierarchical, and conflictual; women resist domination, and this resistance has to be managed if the institution is to survive. Equally crucial is the complex intertwining of male gender power to the unequal divisions of class power, race power, and ethnic power. Male power is, thus, produced and reproduced by other social forces and institutions such as language, law, religion, education, family, popular culture, and media.
A second factor: male power, much like class and state power, is reproduced by both consent and force. Patriarchal violence, as such, involves much more than a simple recognition of it as a problem of the individual, his mindset, or his ignorance. It is systemic. In fact, in the case of honour killing, women and even relatives often participate in, the murder of a mother, daughter, sister or other female members of the family or kin.
Third, if symbolic, physical, and sexual violence is emhedded in androcentric gender relations, if it threatens the safety of half of the population, and if its costs are, economically, high, how does the institution of the state respond? Marxist and feminist theories, in c~ntrast to liberal and post-structuralist positions, question the neutrality of the state and law in the regulation of class, gender, or racial conflicts. The state and its juridico-political structure tend to reproduce economic, social, and cultural relations that are embedded in patriarchy. It took two centuries of women's and feminist struggle to reform the legal frameworks of some Western states along the lines of gender equality. The granting of universal suffrage rights, for instance, involved much more than a 'negotiation' between the state and suffragists. In the course of a century of resistance, suffragists had to take to the streets only to be beaten, jailed, and suppressed by other violent means.
Fourth, while considerable progress has been made in some Western states in instituting gender equality in conventions, charters of rights, constitutions, and legal frameworks, inequality in the extralegal world continues to constrain this equality. This contradiction between formal equality and extra-legal inequality cannot be resolved under the present status quo, although it can be alleviated. Violence against women has not yet been uprooted in countries where legal equality has already been, more or less, achieved (for example, in the Scandinavian countries, or Britain and Canada). The norms of female propriety are still tied to property relations, in both capitalist and precapitalist formations. Untying the bond between the two is a formidable task not possible through legal reform alone.
Fifth, legal equality, a goal yet to be achieved in many states, does not automatically translate into mechanisms (courts, law enforcement, shelters, early warning systems, etc.) to uproot or constrain male violence. In Sweden, the murder of Fadime Sahindal by her father (in 2001) could probably have been averted if the government had known about the seriousness of the threat. The murder of Heshu Yanes Abdalla in Britain (in 2002) also could have been be prevented.
Sixth, the state, even if willing to uproot patriarchal violence, is constrained by the fact that males engage in violence in spite of its consequences. While in many countries the citizen's right to life is not) et recognized by the state, men also feel free to take the life of women on charges of impropriety. This implies that both the state and the citizen need to be educated. Women, in the absence of feminist consciousness, fail to resist violence effectively, and eventually contribute to its perpetuation (production and reproduction). Education, in the form of spreading feminist consciousness by all means possible, is crucial for a serious encounter with patriarchal violence. The formal educational system from kindergarten to the university, and informal education through popular culture, media, literature, arts, and other venues, needs to be mobilized.
Seventh, patriarchal violence is universal. It is both Eastern and Western. In the West, where feminist knowledge emerged, anti-feminism continues to be dominant in popular culture. While identifying male violence as a problem of non-Western societies is a racist claim, it is true that there is an unleashing of male violence in certain parts of the world, especially in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Women of Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, to list only a few, have suffered under theocratic regimes. The civil wars (Iraq since 1961, Turkey 1984-2000, Iran 1979-1980s, Afghanistan since 1978), regional wars (Iran-Iraq in 1980-1988, Iraq-Kuwait 1990-1991, Afghanistan since 1979), and neo-colonialist wars (the U.S. against Iraq 1991 and since 2003, Afghanistan since 2001; Israel in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories) have unleashed terror on the population, and have allowed patriarchal violence a free reign.
Eight, while patriarchy and its violence cannot be reduced to religion, the Islamic theocracies of Iran and Afghanistan codified misogynist legal-political orders, which subjected women to violence enshrined in Islamic shari'a or 'canonical law'. These theocracies, for example, conduct legal stoning to death of married adulterers and allow men to engage in honour killing. They also commit violence such as beating, insulting, detaining, and fining women for violating dress codes. The state justifies these atrocities by appealing to the Koran and shari'a. In the wake of the coming to power of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, many secular states from North Africa to South Asia islamized their laws in order to appease Islamist political movements. The United States and other Western powers trained, financed, and led Islamists in their fight against the secular pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in 1980-1991.
Ninth, in their quest for changing their destinies, people in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran pursued a politics for women's rights, modern justice systems, separation of state and religion, socialism, independence, and other democratic gains. This is part of a rich history of struggle that dates back to the late nineteenth century. However, many Islamists deny the people of the region this period of their history. Equally significant, the mainstream media and Western states also share the Islamist politics of setting up a great divide between the peoples of the region and those in the West. Western Orientalist knowledge, as noted by Edward Said (1979), Ella Shohat (2002), and others, has regularly engaged in treating the peoples of the Orient as backward, ignorant, and irrational.
In the last few decades, a host of theoretical positions ranging from the politics of identity to post-structuralism to post-modernism to cultural relativism have joined the chorus of Orientalists, mainstream media, and Western states in setting up a great divide between the East and the West. Paved with good intentions such as respect for cultural difference, these theoretical positions deny the peoples of the region their history of struggle against religious obscurantism and oppressive ethnic and cultural traditions. They fail to see that the main targets of the Taliban or Iran's Islamic regimes were and are the women of Afghanistan rather than Western states or Western capital. These theoretical positions, emanating from Western academe, have shaped the policies of the members of the European Union and other Western countries, some of which have by now substantial populations practising Islam.
While, as stated earlier, our knowledge about gender violence has advanced substantially, we have yet to learn more in order to move against oppressive gender relations in this complex historical moment. This colossal task requires the co-ordinated work of women activists, feminists, governments, media, educators, political parties, religious leaders, and everyone else. No serious progress can be made without the spread of feminist knowledge, feminist organizing, and grass-roots mobilization on the local, national, and international levels.
Finally, feminism and feminist epistemology and knowledge as advocated here is critical and anti-racist and capable of seeing and understanding the global context while simultaneously operating at the local and national levels. The critical feminist knowledge required is one capable of going beyond all boundaries constructed on racial, national, class, gender, and ethnic grounds. It is a type of knowledge that defies ideological chauvinism of all types. This is a mammoth task and challenge which faces all women and feminists concerned with improving women's conditions and ameliorating violence against women.
It is in this context that a unique seminar was organized by the Consulate General of Sweden in istanbul called the International Seminar on Violence in the Name of Honour, held in istanbul on 4-6 December of 2003. The organizers brought together a diverse group of activists, policy makers, documentary makers, and academics in order to engage in a re-thinking of honour killing and to strategize towards global action in con'-ibating violence against women. Readers of this book will see the contributions of this diverse group to an understanding of violence and ways to challenge it. As with other seminars and conferences, participants learned a great deal through interacting, debating, and talking with each other. This experience shows that with modest support from a state, it is possible to contribute to the struggle against violence.
This book is organized into four sections. The first section, 'Theoretical Explorations of Honour Killing', provides methodological and theoretical attention to the issue of honour violence. Shahrzad Mojab's 'The Particularity of "Honour" and the Universality of "Killing"' offers ideas for the prevention of the crime of honour killings and discusses both short-term and long-term interventions in the regime of gender relations that perpetuates violence against women. Niikhet Sirman analyses the social conditions in Turkey that produce honour-related crimes in her article 'Kinship, Politics, and Love: Honour in Post-Colonial Contexts-The Case of Turkey', paying particular attention to anthropological kinship categories and gender. She shows how the issue of 'customary crimes' plays out within the post-colonial nation-state of Turkey, which claims to be a modern state institution, and the important role of the notion of love and the family in the project of state building. 'Honour Killing, Patriarchy, and the State: Women in Israel' by Nahla Abdo analyses sexual violence and honour-killing at the local, national, and global levels and argues that a proper understanding of the phenomenon of honour-killing must be contextualized: First, historically, in order to see and recognize changes over time; and second, structurally and institutionally, allowing for a proper comprehension of the socio-economic, political, legal, and juridical forces of the state, particularly the colonial state.
Asa Elden writes 'Life-and-Death Honour: Young Women's Violent Stories About Reputation, Virginity, and Honour-In a Swedish Context', which provides a feminist perspective on male honour-related violence, using case studies, legal cases, and interviews with Arab and Kurdish women. Nicole Pope in her chapter 'Honour Killings: Instruments of Patriarchal Control' compares and contrasts violence against women in so-called 'Western' and Islamic societies. Pope reflects on the problem of culture versus the social in relation to such violence, and argues that no matter where violence against women occurs, whether in the West or not, such violence ultimately revolves around the issue of control over women. She concludes by stressing the importance of support for local initiatives to combat this violence.
The second section focuses on the theme of 'Community Struggle Against Honour Killing' within both Turkey and Sweden. Nebahat Akkoç of the women's organization KA-MER presents 'The Cultural Basis of Violence in the Name of Honour', giving a brief overview of the history of this organization which provides support to women faced with violence. She relates the stories of two murdered women, Semse Allak and Kadriye Demirel, and outlines the progress made by this organization in the space of a year. In addition, she details twenty-one applications for assistance. The article concludes with KA-MER's ground-level advice for dealing with the issue of honour violence against women, with important comments on the ownership of language and on advocacy through practice, and specifies seven areas requiring improvement within the context of the Turkish state and civil society. The second piece in this section is Ka-Mer's 'The Story of Ay§e', which tells of one of the concrete successes of Kamer in action-but while the life of Ane was saved, new problems arise as she and her husband must adapt to life in a new city. The contribution of Leyla Pervizat is entitled 'In the Name of Honour', and is reprinted from the journal Human Rights Dialogue. Her article emphasizes the importance of redefining the concept of honour within the community as an important preventative step in combating violence against women in Turkey.
Turning to Sweden, Dil§a Demirbag-Sten's 'Gendering Multiculturalism' addresses the growing problem of racism in Sweden, and the debate around honour violence in that country. She argues for the need to allow minorities within Sweden to formulate the problem and its solutions, as these people are the ones who are affected by it. Riyadh AI-Baldawi's article, 'Long-Term Measures to Combat Honour-Related Violence in Patriarchal Families', after recognizing some Swedish government initiatives around violence in families, outlines four steps to be taken, ranging from short-term measures to longterm interventions. Finally, Niklas Kelemen's chapter, 'The Dialogue Project to Prevent Violence: Discussions with Fathers and Sons', gives an account of a large seminar with men from the immigrant community as an example of the kind of fieldwork undertaken by that Project to combat chauvinistic attitudes towards women.
The third section of our book focuses on 'State Responses to Honour Killing', and begins with a key-note address by Yakm Ertiirk, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, entitled 'Violence in the Name of Honour Within the Context of International Regimes.' She provides a synopsis of the international agenda to combat this violence, and includes an annex giving a chronology of the evolving United Nations actions towards women's human rights and gender equality. Christina Curry argues for the reappropriation of the term 'honour' in her 'Acting with Honour: Justice Not Excuses'. After outlining core human rights contained within international treaties, she addresses the issue of making rights a reality, with particular attention to the Turkish penal code.
The last three articles in our book return to the Swedish context. Lise Bergh, State Secretary, Swedish Ministry of Justice, presents us with 'Swedish Government Initiatives to Help Young People at Risk of Honour-Related Violence', which briefly introduces us to the history of how the Swedish government came to see honour violence against women as an important issue needing to be addressed; she indicates some of the ways in which the Swedish government has set out to change attitudes and address women's safety. Kickis Ahre Algamo contributes 'Confronting Honour Violence: The Swedish Police at Work', which provides a perspective from the National Criminal Investigation department. Here we are presented with the initiatives of this police force as they overcome various obstacles to their work, including immigrant fear of security forces in general; the article also describes 'double liability to penalty' provisions within Swedish jurisprudence, which allows Sweden to set a higher penalty for a serious crime punished by a disproportionately low sentence in a foreign country. Our final chapter comes from Javeria Rizvi who reflects on 'Violence in the Name of Honour in Swedish Society.' She analyses cases of honour killing in terms of how Swedish courts tried the cases, and also in terms of how the media covered these events, and closes with lessons to be drawn.
Since the seminar from which the chapters presented here was held, there have been numerous progressive developments in the struggle against honour violence. In Turkey, amendments to the Penal Code opens doors for the possibility of fully punishing perpetrators of these crimes; it remains to be seen how effective these new laws are in action. The establishment of a Ministry of Women's Affairs in Palestine is a step in the right direction, and a promising venue for carrying through women's voices and their quest for rights and gender equality. Yet, similar to other political changes, such as in the Turkish case, the challenge for Arab and particularly Palestinian critical feminists is to see the extent to which this ministry can survive under internal (national) pressures, such as the economic, political, religious fundamentalist movements and so on, as well as the external (regional and international) pressures, particularly of continuous Israeli occupation and colonial policies. In another development, European police met in the summer of 2004 in The Hague to strategize ways to combat honour killings; such violence is now becoming widely recognized by states as an issue requiring urgent attention.
The final section, our Appendices, contains a short list of recommended resources on the theme of women and violence, and also the original Programme for the Seminar on Violence in the Name of Honour, 4-6 December 2003.
The original seminar on which this book is based, and indeed the book itself, would not have been possible without the generous support of the Consulate General of Sweden. In particular, the hospitality of Consul-General Ingmar Karlsson and Mrs Margareta Karlsson was generous beyond everyone's expectations and was greatly appreciated by all seminar participants. Annika Svahnstrom, Consul at the Consulate General of Sweden, hosted all the participants of the seminar and graciously offered her time during the production of this book. Finally, we are grateful to Stephan Dobson for his superb editorial work in bringing this international volume to completion.
1 See .
2 See ,
3 See .
Section 1
Theoretical Explorations of Honour Killing
The Particularity of 'Honour' and the Universality of 'Killing':
From Early Warning Signs to Feminist Pedagogy 1
Shahrzad Mojab
Introduction
T he increasing violence against women and our inability to curb it pose a serious challenge to every individual, but especially to activists and institutions such as academia, governments, media, and schools. Male violence is of ancient origins and is deeply rooted in the very fabric of social, economic, and political organization. It is rather obvious that this violence cannot be eliminated without a radical rupture with the regime of gender relations known as patriarchy.
This paper offers ideas for the short-term, immediate, prevention of the crime of honour killing, and discusses long-term intervention in the regime of gender relations that perpetrates the killing of women. This study is based on case studies of honour killing in Iraqi Kurdistan, and in the Kurdish Diasporas in Europe.
…..
1 This study is, in part, based on my previous and ongoing research on honour killing. |
