|
Quiet Professional
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: NorCal
Posts: 15,370
|
From UN Population Fund reports. 
Quote:
"Honour" Killings
Throughout the world, perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are murdered by members of their own families, many of them for the "dishonour" of having been raped, often as not by a member of their own extended family.
Many forms of communally sanctioned violence against women, such as "honour" killings, are associated with the community's or the family's demand for sexual chastity and virginity. Perpetrators of such wanton acts often receive light sentences or are excused by the courts entirely because defence of the family's honour is treated as a mitigating circumstance.
"Honour" killings are on the rise worldwide, according to Asma Jahangir, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions. Ms. Jahangir is working closely with United Nations special investigators on violence against women and on the independence of judges and lawyers to address the issue.
"The perpetrators of these crimes are mostly male family members of the murdered women, who go unpunished or receive reduced sentences on the justification of having murdered to defend their misconceived notions of 'family honour,'" Jahangir wrote in her 2000 annual report to the Commission on Human Rights.32 Such killings have been reported in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Sweden, Turkey, Uganda and the United Kingdom, according to the report.
On the order of clerics, an 18-year-old woman was flogged to death in Batsail, Bangladesh, for "immoral" behaviour, according to the report. In Egypt, a father paraded his daughter's severed head through the streets shouting, "I avenged my honour."
The report says that "honour" killings tend to be more prevalent in, but are not limited to, countries with a majority Muslim population. It adds, however, that Islamic leaders have condemned the practice and say it has no religious basis.
http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2000/english/ch03.html
|
UNPFA is at http://www.unfpa.org/public/
And so it goes...
Richard's $.02 
__________________
“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” - To Kill A Mockingbird (Atticus Finch)
“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” - Robert Heinlein
|