Purvi Patel Could Be Just the Beginning

by Emily Bazelon
The New York Times Magazine

The prosecution of Purvi Patel began in sorrow and ended in more sadness this week. Patel, a 33-year-old woman who lives in Indiana, was accused of feticide ? specifically, illegally inducing her own abortion ? and accused of having a baby whom she allowed to die. The facts supporting each count are murky, but a jury convicted Patel in February, and on Monday she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

It’s tempting to simply look away from Patel’s case on the grounds that it is an outlier, however tragic. But it demonstrates how unsparing the criminal-justice system can be to women whose pregnancies end in (or otherwise involve) suspicious circumstances. If one lesson of the case is about the legal risk of inducing your own late-term abortion, another is about the peril of trying to get medical help when you are bleeding and in pain.

Last July, Patel went to an emergency room in South Bend, Ind., where she told the doctors she had a miscarriage. Asked what she had done with the fetal remains, she said the baby was stillborn and, not knowing what else to do, she put the body in a bag and left it in a Dumpster. The police were able to recover the body. Later, they also found text messages in which Patel told a friend about ordering pills to induce an abortion from a pharmacy in Hong Kong and about taking the medication. Three days later, she texted the same friend, “Just lost the baby.”

Patel was charged with felony child neglect and feticide, based on the supposed self-abortion. Asked by Slate’s Leon Neyfakh about the apparent contradiction between the charges, the St. Joseph County prosecutor, Ken Cotter, said that a person can be guilty of feticide under Indiana law for deliberately trying to end a pregnancy, even if the fetus survives. As Neyfakh points out, the Indiana feticide statute exempts legal abortions ? but while the pills Patel took are available in the United States with a prescription, it’s against the law to order them online, as she apparently did. And so she was prosecuted for taking the medication as well as for letting her baby die after the self-abortion failed.

If this case were only about a woman who clearly gave birth to a live baby and then killed her child, it would be clear cut. There is a line between pregnancy and birth, and once it is crossed, the state has just as much at stake in protecting the life of a newborn as it does in protecting the life of anyone else. But the evidence that Patel’s baby was born alive is sharply contested. The pathologist who testified for the defense, Shaku Teas, said the baby was stillborn. Teas told the court the fetus was at 23 or 24 weeks gestation and that its lungs weren’t developed enough to breathe. (Here’s more support for this position.)

But the pathologist for the prosecution, Joseph Prahlow, testified that the fetus was further along than that ? at 25 to 30 weeks gestation, which is past the point of viability ? and was born alive. News reports from the trial emphasized Prahlow’s use of a “lung float test” in making his determination. The idea behind the test ? which dates from the 17th century ? is that if the lungs float in water, the baby took at least one breath. If they sink, then the fetus died before leaving the womb.

If that sounds like the old test for witchcraft ? if an accused witch floated, she was judged guilty; if she sank, she was innocent ? it’s also about as old and nearly as discredited. “The lung float test was disproven over 100 years ago as an indicator for live birth,” Gregory J. Davis, assistant state medical examiner for Kentucky and a professor of pathology and lab medicine at the University of Kentucky, told me. “It’s just not valid.”

When I called Prahlow, who is a professor of pathology and lab medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, South Bend, and a former president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, he conceded that “the lung float test, in and of itself, is unreliable.” Still, Prahlow argued, the lung test could “provide corroborating evidence, in light of additional findings.”

Prahlow enumerated those findings to me as he had to the Patel jury: The weight of the lungs and the other organs, the inflation of the lungs and the air sacs, the presence of blood in the lung vessels and the “relative maturity” of the lungs. Put these findings together, along with a lack of blood in the baby’s body, and “I can’t come up with any other explanation other than that this baby was born alive,” Prahlow said.

But Davis was unconvinced. He said that while he knows and respects Prahlow, his conclusion was “dead wrong.” Prahlow’s list of findings are still “totally nonspecific” as to whether Patel’s baby died in utero or after being born, Davis said. “Or even if we agree hypothetically that the baby took a breath, that doesn’t mean Ms. Patel did anything wrong. What if she was scared and bleeding herself, and she didn’t clamp the cord in time, because she didn’t know how, and the baby died?”

To Davis, the forensics in this case can’t determine whether Patel was culpable any more than looking at a body that fell from a high building can determine whether the fall was a suicide, an accident or a homicide. “Sometimes the only answer you can give as a scientist is ‘I don’t know,’” he said.

Whatever happened to Patel and her baby at the point of delivery, it’s hard to imagine that either the prosecution or the judge at sentencing would have come down as hard on her if they weren’t sure she’d tried to induce her own illegal abortion. And this is where Patel’s case moves from a fight over birth to a fight over pregnancy.

This is the first case I can find in which a state-level feticide law has been successfully used to punish a woman for trying to have an abortion. Women have been charged with other crimes after taking abortion pills without a prescription, but the feticide charge appears to be Indiana’s idea. It could spread, though: About 38 states have fetal homicide laws in place.

The common justification for these measures is that they protect pregnant women against unscrupulous abortion providers or abusive partners. Indiana’s feticide law was intended to apply to the knowing or intentional termination of another’s pregnancy, its history shows. Abortion opponents, who support feticide laws, have given repeated assurances that their aim is not to put pregnant women in prison. “We do not think women should be criminalized,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List told NPR in 2012 after a woman in Idaho was prosecuted for a self-induced abortion, also with pills she ordered online. “Criminal sanctions or any kind of sanctions are appropriate for abortionists and not for women.”

Nevertheless, prosecutions like these are growing more frequent. In Indiana, before Purvi Patel, there was Bei Bei Shuai, a Chinese immigrant who tried to commit suicide while pregnant and was also charged with feticide. The charges against Shuai were dropped in 2013 after she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and spent a year in custody. In Iowa, Christine Taylor faced charges for attempted fetal homicide after falling down the stairs, going to the hospital and being reported for trying to end her pregnancy.

The charges in Taylor’s case were dropped, too. But in an Op-Ed in The Times last year, Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and Jeanne Flavin, a sociology professor at Fordham University, detailed similar cases. A study they conducted, surveying cases since 1973, turned up hundreds of arrests of women for actions taken during their own pregnancies that the authorities deemed harmful to their fetuses.

Many of the cases involved women who took drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines during pregnancy. But they also included women who refused cesarean sections their doctors recommended ? and, lately, women who took abortion pills they ordered online. Last September, I wrote about a mother in Pennsylvania, Jennifer Whalen, who went to prison for helping her 16-year-old daughter do that, even though it was a first-trimester abortion and the girl came to no harm. (Whalen has since been released.)

Patel’s case stands out, for the draconian length of the sentence she received, and for the disturbing image of a baby left in a Dumpster. But it is also part of a pattern. “This case shows how easy it is to sweep up women who’ve had miscarriages and stillbirths into a criminal justice framework,” Paltrow told me. For her, the key question is how to ensure that fewer women become as desperate as Patel must have been about her pregnancy. “Do you think these cases will be less rare if you terrify people and make them criminals?” she said.

The Sex Industry’s Attack on Feminists

by Meghan Murphy
Truthdig

Pornographers have long defended the products and practices of their extremely profitable industry as “free speech,” even as they sexualize male power and violence against women. Similarly, defenders of prostitution, which they strategically call “sex work,” frame the movement for its legalization and normalization as liberatory.

But these groups only support free speech and liberty insofar as it applies to their interests. Those who speak out against the sex industry are excluded from their version of “freedom.”

We saw evidence of this in March, when a number of prostitution lobby groups threatened to boycott a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, that had secured the renowned journalist and Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges as a keynote speaker. Because Hedges had written an article calling prostitution “the quintessential expression of global capitalism,” these groups attempted to no-platform Hedges and would have succeeded in their efforts if not for an impassioned response from local women’s groups.

Smear campaigns against feminists and allies who dare to tell the truth about male power and violence are nothing new. In the 1990s, pornographers launched a campaign against professor Catharine MacKinnon and feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, comparing them to Nazis and accusing them of suppressing free speech when, in fact, the 1983 Minneapolis anti-pornography ordinance that they had written--defining pornography as a civil rights violation against women--was not an attempt to censor speech but instead to address the harm done to women by the pornography industry.

In order to appeal to well-meaning progressives, a “sex-worker rights” movement was invented to oppose those feminists who believed prostitution to be an extension and perpetuation of male power and violence. The prostitution lobby adopted the language of the labor movement in order to advocate for men’s rights to open brothels and buy sex from women, and it also adopted the language of the feminist movement to frame prostitution as a woman’s choice.

They have the media on their side, as well as the pimps and johns. The capitalist interests of mainstream media mean that pornography and prostitution are presented simply as business ventures, and their patriarchal foundations mean that the idea of women’s bodies as consumable objects is accepted as the norm.

In recent years, the sex industry has worked alongside the media to completely decontextualize the system of prostitution. This neoliberal approach is part of an ongoing effort to defang movements that challenge systems of power: If we are all simply individuals, working toward our own personal empowerment and therefore solely responsible for our own “successes” and “failures,” then there is no need for collective organizing. When Margaret Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, only individuals who must look after themselves first and foremost, this is what she meant.

By framing a system that funnels women--particularly marginalized women--into prostitution as not only a choice that women make but as a potentially liberatory one, these groups are able to disguise the way in which pornography props up male power, placing the onus for women’s subordination on women themselves. By framing the societal pressure to self-objectify as empowerment, society is permitted to ignore the reasons women learn to seek power through sexualization and the male gaze. By focusing on women’s agency, we ignore men’s behavior.

What is truly being defended by groups that claim to lobby for “sex-worker rights” is not, in fact, women’s human rights but the financial and sexual interests of men. This is why the discourse deliberately avoids addressing the harms caused by these men.

The campaign to frame the pro-prostitution lobby as a grass-roots effort to help marginalized women has been very successful. By ignoring the inherent power dynamic at hand when a man pays a woman for sexual acts, and instead forcing the conversation to be one about women’s choice, those who might consider themselves feminist are pushed into a corner: “Do I support women’s right to choose?” The obvious answer is yes. But that question is a misleading one. The real question is: “Do I support poor and marginalized women’s right to a better life than that offered to them by exploitative men?”

While manipulative language designed to appeal to the liberal masses is a huge part of advocacy to decriminalize pimps and johns, another key component is the smearing of feminists who challenge this discourse.

Industry advocates will stop at nothing to silence the voices of those who speak out against their interests. Labeled as prudes, religious conservatives, oppressors and bigots, the war against these feminists has recently culminated in widespread efforts to no-platform dissenters.

When the Swedish journalist Kajsa Ekis Ekman was scheduled to speak in London last year about her book “Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self,” the bookstore hosting the event was threatened with boycotts.

The current climate in Anglo-Saxon feminism is one that supports witch hunts, Ekman told me. Such a witch hunt begins with “smear campaigns, appears to be coming ‘from below,’ and calls famous feminists power-crazed, elitist, ‘cis-sexist,’ racist and ‘whorephobic,’ ” she said. “It then proceeds to full-blown silencing campaigns, boycott threats, petitions, isolation of anyone who sides with the feminist and guilt by association.”

In 2003, Melissa Farley, a clinical psychologist and the founder of the nonprofit group Prostitution Research and Education, conducted a study in New Zealand about violence and post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by prostituted people, and she later testified in Parliament there about the interviews conducted. A New Zealand prostitution advocate took issue with her research and filed a complaint against her with the American Psychological Association (APA). The complaint was ignored by the APA and not taken seriously by her colleagues but is continually framed by the prostitution lobby as legitimate and used as an excuse to pressure others to dismiss her extensive and illuminating research.

Julie Bindel, a feminist journalist who has reported on the global sex trade for years, has revealed that the International Union of Sex Workers in Britain was little more than a mouthpiece for pimps and brothel owners. She has also reported on the extensive failures of legalized prostitution in Amsterdam. But in March, after complaints from prostitution lobby groups, she was removed from a panel discussing an American film about prostitution.

Prostitution survivors face silencing tactics as well. Bridget Perrier, a First Nations educator and co-founder of the Toronto-based sex-trade survivors and abolition group Sextrade101, said the efforts of the pro-prostitution lobby are focused on invalidating the experiences of women who have left the industry. Their stories are often called into question.

Rachel Moran survived seven years in the sex trade in Ireland and has published a book about her experiences, addressing many of the myths and lies perpetuated by the sex-work lobby. For her crime--speaking the truth--she has been subjected to endless harassment, accused more than once of inventing her story.

“I have been defamed, slandered, threatened, physically confronted and screamed at,” Moran told me. “I’ve had my home address, bank details and personal email circulated amongst some of the most seemingly unhinged people, who have tweeted me portions of my home address in a clear we-know-where-to-find-you style threat.”

She added: “It is consistently contended that I was never in prostitution, although the records proving I was are held by the Irish social services and the Dublin District Children Court.”

The denial of truths that would hurt efforts to present a sanitized version of the sex industry aimed at selling prostitution as “simply a job like any other” is key to the campaign for its legalization.

Moran told me she was shocked at the lack of compassion exhibited toward her by sex-industry advocates who claim to have a vested interest in women’s safety. “They simply do not give a damn that they are constructing a deliberate and organized bullying campaign against a woman who was ritualistically sexually abused by adult males since she was 15 years old,” she said. “My truths do not suit them, so my truths must be silenced.”

In desperation, unable and unwilling to respond to basic feminist, socialist arguments against the sex industry--namely, that it exists on a foundation of male power and capitalism, perpetuating misogynist notions about male “needs” and women’s bodies as the things that exist to satisfy these socialized desires--these lobby groups resort to lies and slander.

These groups try to pass smear campaigns off as “critique,” but they are anything but, Ekman, the Swedish journalist, said. “What is going on now is not critique. Rather, it resembles a full-scale Maoist cultural revolution.”

“If you are a prominent feminist, you won’t escape this,” she continued. “If you haven’t been targeted yet, you either will be or you’re not dangerous enough.”

I have been writing about the sex industry and prostitution legislation in Canada for years now. The attacks on my character and work have been relentless. In recent weeks, a number of Canadian sex-industry lobby groups mounted a major smear campaign online, framing arguments against the objectification, exploitation and abuse of women as “bigotry” and willfully distorting my work and views beyond all recognition.

The nonsensical and baseless accusations hurled at me--“transphobic,” “whorephobic,” racist and so on--replicate those used against all women who challenge the status quo in this way. The intention is not justice, but to slander feminists so that their arguments can be ignored and dismissed and in order to bully others into doing the same. The one thing they always fail to mention is the truth.

Women in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be killed than the general population, and the men responsible are much less likely to be convicted when the victim is a prostituted woman. In Canada, indigenous women are overrepresented in prostitution and experience higher levels of violence than non-aboriginal women, in general. Legalization has proved not to be a solution to exploitation, violence and abuse.

These individuals and groups co-opt the struggles of marginalized people in order to defend a multibillion-dollar industry that takes the lives and humanity of thousands of women and girls across the globe every year. Rather than allow dissenters to threaten their interests with words and arguments, they engage in underhanded tactics to silence independent feminist writers and journalists. They frame our words as “violence” but do nothing to fight the perpetrators of actual violence. These groups have never engaged in a public campaign against an abusive man, never petitioned to end the employment of a violent john, never called those who force girls into brothels or onto the streets “bigots.” Their targets are not corporate capitalism or sex traffickers, nor are they porn kings or abusive brothel owners. No. Their targets are feminists.

In her essay “Liberalism and the Death of Feminism,” MacKinnon wrote that “once there was a feminist movement”--a movement that understood that criticizing practices like rape, incest, prostitution and abuse was not the same as criticizing the victims of these practices. “It was a movement that knew [that] when material conditions preclude 99 percent of your options, it is not meaningful to call the remaining one per cent--what you are doing--your choice.” She wrote these words 25 years ago, and we are still fighting the same battles. Now, to speak out against patriarchal systems means your livelihood will be threatened, as well as your credibility and your freedom to speak.

You cannot claim to be progressive but advocate against democracy. You cannot claim to be feminist but support the silencing of women. This new McCarthyism will not liberate us. It offers us up to those who work toward our demise.

Meghan Murphy is a writer and journalist from Vancouver, British Columbia. Her website is Feminist Current.

St. Louis Grapples -- and Fails to Grapple -- With the Matter of Murdered Black Women

by Juan Thompson
The Intercept

On March 30, with the sun about to set on Park Avenue in downtown St. Louis, Angelica Wysinger, 26, was sitting in a car with her romantic partner William Crume, 23. As the couple talked, Wysinger’s three children -- ages nine, seven and two -- sat in the back seat.

Suddenly, someone in a silver car pulled up alongside the family’s vehicle and unleashed a hail of gunfire.

Crume was pronounced dead at the scene, the nine-year-old survived a gunshot wound to the hand, and Wysinger, who won $55,558 in a state lotto two years ago, died at a local hospital.

A relative of the dead mother said the family is still grieving and that “we hope police find the people who did this. Right now we’re not being told anything by anybody.” Police refused to comment. The murders remain unsolved.

In the early morning, a month after the murders on Park Avenue, 25-year-old Korie Hodges’s father visited her apartment in North St. Louis to drop off a child for Hodges to babysit. As the father approached the front door, he found it ajar.

Upon entering the flat, he discovered Hodges and another woman named Keerica Bolden, 22, in a bedroom, dead of apparent gunshot wounds. In a nearby room, the grandfather found two young children unharmed. In an insulting twist, days after Hodges’s death, local media splashed her mug shot across St. Louis’s television screens as they reported she had been charged with looting during the Ferguson riots.

A mere three days after the murders of Hodges and Bolden, another pair of women were killed just blocks away. Sisters Antquonette Hale, 20, and Tahnaizja Smith, 15, were found dead of gunshot wounds in a trashed vacant lot surrounded by condemned buildings.

It was the second double homicide involving black women in the North Side St. Louis neighborhood of Greater Ville in five days.

One can’t help but think: If four white women had been murdered in a such way, in such a short period of time, in such a confined area, wouldn’t their deaths be front-page news across the country? Alas, the response has been muted.

Six months into 2015, St. Louis is grappling with an increased homicide rate. Through May, there have been 70 homicides in the city -- which is roughly 18 more than at this point last year. Over 88 percent of the victims have been black, and women accounted for nearly a third of those killed. Almost all of the murdered were killed by firearms.



Missouri, according to a January report from the Violence Policy Center Missouri, was the country’s leader in black homicide victims in 2012. It is the fourth time in five years that the Show Me State has garnered the grim honor.

Black Missourians were murdered at a staggering rate of 34.98 per 100,000 -- the highest of any state in the union and twice the national average, according to the report, which went on to highlight how bad things were for black women specifically:

"While black females have the highest rate of death at the hands of male offenders -- two and a half times higher than white females (2.59 per 100,000 versus 1.06 per 100,000) and two times higher than all women combined (2.59 per 100,000 versus 1.22 per 100,000) -- the circumstances, relationships and weapons remain mind-numbingly constant for virtually all females of any race killed by males: someone they know, usually an intimate partner, during an argument or other non-felony event, and most commonly with a gun."
Despite the data, murdered black women receive, at best, hit-and-run coverage. Local news outlets will report such stories, but rarely is there follow-up; and, as many families will argue, the same is true with regard to law enforcement.

The unsolved murders of Florida teens Angelia Mangum and Tjhisha Ball -- a pair of black women discovered nude, hands bound, dead in a pool of blood on the side of a highway last September -- is emblematic of this pattern.

Mangum’s mother told me the police have refused to offer any details, and that she hasn’t spoken to them in months. A spokesperson from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s office declined comment. Meanwhile a quick Google search shows major media outlets haven’t covered the homicides since last October.

When the Florida homicides first came to light, lazy members of the media reported that both girls worked as sex workers. In reality, only Ball worked as a stripper, meaning -- in explaining why the case has been largely ignored -- she had multiple strikes against her: sex worker, poor, black and woman. Local news outlets elected to use their dispirited mugshots in news broadcasts.

For comparison, the 2014 murder of University of Virginia student Hannah Graham has received ample coverage -- CNN, NBC, and the New York Post are among the outlets providing updates in the last month alone. This kind of discrepancy leaves observers to wonder when black women will receive the same sort of compassionate coverage from the news media and attention from the police.

“If they was two white girls from St. Johns -- a wealthy, mostly white Jacksonville suburb,” Mangum’s mother told me, “this would be different.”

Back in Missouri, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police department is 63 percent white in a city where black residents constitute a plurality of 49 percent. The disparity has convinced some black St. Lousians that white cops don’t care about dead black homicide victims.

It should be noted that all of the St. Louis cases detailed above are open investigations, according to the police, and the perpetrators could still be brought to justice. But it’s hard to hold out much hope when two-thirds of St. Louis’s 2014 homicides -- visited, again, on overwhelmingly black victims -- remain unsolved.

It’s not clear that the families of black female homicide victims can even take some small comfort in protest movements. Even as demonstrators across the country confront a police state over its killings of unarmed black men, critics have charged the Black Lives Matter movement with excluding dead black women from the broader discourse around police brutality.

Indeed, black women and girls killed by the police, such as Rekia Boyd in Chicago, Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit and Yvette Smith near Austin, Texas, did not receive the sort of media attention and protests that followed the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray.

In her book Ghettoside, Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy reported that Los Angeles police officers regularly referred to a murder in one of the city’s black communities “as a nothing murder. ‘NHI -- No Human Involved,’ the cops used to say.”

Does a similar sentiment exist among St. Louis police when it comes to murdered black women? In what researchers call a racial empathy gap, studies have purported to show that white Americans feel less empathy for their black counterparts.

Thus when black women -- one of the most neglected, pilloried and marginalized groups in the country -- are murdered, it makes sense that law enforcement and the news media, two institutions disproportionately stocked with white people, wouldn’t care much, if at all.

Kim Curtis, a professor of criminal justice at Harris Stowe State University in St. Louis, told me, “There is a serious problem with black homicide in St. Louis, and when black people get a cold, black women get the flu.” Curtis echoed the Violence Policy Center Missouri, noting that most of the black women murdered in St. Louis are killed by male acquaintances.

“Domestic abuse, sexual assault, gender-based violence is a huge problem here,” she said, “and until we deal with that and get people the help and resources they need, black women will continue to be murdered at alarming rates.”

Ultimately, despite the lack of urgency from the media and police, the families and loved ones left behind by murdered black women do care. Too often, however, news outlets and law enforcement authorities seek to amplify the perceived shortcomings of black women victims, as was the case with Hodges in St. Louis and Ball and Mangum in Florida.

It’s as if black women, even in victimhood, cannot possess the most basic trait all humans share: imperfection.

“No matter what anyone does in life, her life doesn’t deserve to be ignored and forgotten,” Curtis said. “It’s a clear, sad truth that the lives of black women don’t matter.”

Photos from left, clockwise: Angelica Wysinger, Angelia Mangum, Ke-Erica D. Bolden, Antquonette Hale, Tjhisha Ball, and Korie Hodges.

One woman's nightmare, and a crime against humanity

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Forced to marry her own rapist, Hanan now lives in terror of losing her son – and of being murdered by her family. Her case-history introduces a four-day series investigating a global scandal that destroys many thousands of lives every year

Call her Hanan. She sits in front of me, a red scarf tied round her long intelligent face, her wide, bright eyes sparkling as she tells her story, her two-year-old son Omar restless on the chair beside her. To save the "honour" of her family – and to avoid being killed by her youngest brother – she has married her own rapist. To save the "honour" of her family – to stay alive – she is now divorcing her rapist. Omar, drinking orange juice, jumping on his plastic chair, is the rapist's son.

Hanan is the victim of a vast, corrupt system of "honour" crimes that plagues the Middle East, and takes the lives of at least 5,000 women – perhaps four times that number – a year, a vicious patriarchal system of extra-judicial killings in which a chance conversation between an unmarried woman and a stranger, a mere rumour of extra-marital relations – let alone sexual relations – leads to death by throat-cutting, strangulation, beheading or shooting. These executions – usually by members of the women's own family – are almost always committed in secret. They are always brutal. They are a scourge on society. Policemen and judges often connive with the murderers.

Hanan is a Palestinian Sunni Muslim, raped in her own home in Jordan by another Palestinian, but "honour" crimes are neither a uniquely Muslim phenomenon nor a religious tradition. Christians practice the "honour killing" of women. So do Hindus. From south-east Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan to Pakistan and India, in Egypt and Gaza and the West Bank – across an area far wider than the old Ottoman empire – women are shamefully murdered to "cleanse" their families amid the squalor of mountain villages, refugee camps and city slums. "Honour" crimes are the greatest taboo of the region which, through emigration, has spread to Europe and the Americas.

Hanan has been lucky – so far. She tells her story with courage, sitting beside the women who run a shelter in Amman for Jordan's potential "honour" victims. But 31-year-old Hanan is also frightened. Exactly a week after we met, a Jordanian man confessed to killing his 16-year-old niece to save his family's "honour" after she was sexually assaulted – Hanan's own tragedy – by a 17-year-old who took her virginity. The uncle fired 30 machine-gun rounds at his niece at Deir Alla, close to Amman, "to cleanse the family honour", although other members of his family had already married the girl off to a cousin in the hope of concealing the rape.

"My father is blind and I was living with him in a very small house, looking after him when he wasn't selling feather dusters," Hanan says. "The rest of my family – my mother, three brothers and two sisters – live elsewhere. All I did was look after my father. Then one afternoon when my father was at work, I went to take a nap. But I woke up to find a man on top of me. He was a thief who had got in through the roof and I couldn't get him off me. I could do nothing. I screamed and screamed but no one heard me and he raped me. He was a rough-looking man , with the scar of a knife wound on his cheek and tattoos on his arms. I think he was drunk because he smelled of alcohol. He was like a demon.

"I tried to commit suicide the same afternoon, so I wouldn't have to tell my father what had happened. I swallowed a whole pack of pills. Nothing happened – but I slept for two whole days. I wanted to tell my father, but I didn't tell him for another 10 days. When I did, he was very upset and he was crying. He got sick and at one point they were going to take him to hospital. Then he said to me: 'No one knows and no one needs to know, so we can keep it between us. But after a month and a half, I had symptoms like I was pregnant – still, I didn't tell my father this for another two months. I was too shy. But my period didn't come for three months. My father then told me to go to a doctor to have a check-up. He was sad and crying all the time." By the standards of other poor Palestinian families, Hanan's father was a remarkably kind man. Still Hanan's mother and brothers and sisters knew nothing of her plight.

"I discovered I was pregnant when I went to the doctor. Both my father and I were very fearful. Both of us were scared of my brothers and how they would react. I was most scared of the youngest, who is 24, a typical Jordanian guy, easily angered. So we left our place and moved elsewhere in Amman without telling the rest of the family. I tried to do an abortion by drinking anything I could find. I got many medications, but they didn't work. We tried to find someone who would do the abortion but we didn't know anyone. Days were going by – and it was obvious I was pregnant. All the time, of course, the family were trying to find us."

Hanan tried to travel to Egypt with the help a friend of her father's, a Lebanese man who was also blind and who suggested sending the young woman to Lebanon but there was fighting in Beirut. They wanted to obtain a passport for Hanan but the Lebanese man became ill and by then Hanan was six months pregnant. A doctor eventually came to her home and told her of the shelter run by the Jordanian Women's Union. She was immediately brought to the house where other women in fear of their families are cared for by volunteers and lawyers, a special section of the building cordoned off with a locked iron gate for those most in danger.

"I thought I would have the baby and then give it away," Hanan says. "The women helped me even though I wanted to give it away. But deep inside me, I wanted the baby. I couldn't say that to my father because we didn't know the identity of the man who raped me. But I knew this man was from the same neighbourhood and there was a neighbour of ours whose son knew the rapist's name.

"While I was in the shelter, the women tried to convince me to keep the baby. My mind was in conflict with itself. But when I delivered my baby, it was a different day to anything else in my life." Here Hanan's eyes lit up, independence amid adversity. "You know, you can say you don't want a baby, but you do. I was crying and scared that someone was going to say they would take the baby. And I was scared to say I wanted to keep my little boy."

Under Jordanian law, a women's shelter must inform the police if a child is born without the presence of the mother's family. When the cops arrived, they were polite but put a policeman on guard outside her door and grilled Hanan until six in the morning. "They made me feel like I was guilty," she says. Hanan told them all she knew about the rapist and about her father, who then told the police of the neighbour's son. When they showed the boy a set of photographs of criminals, he immediately identified the man who had raped Hanan. She recognised him too. The man, who had a long crime record, was already in prison for attempted murder. The police took Omar away to register his birth in a social services office but he was returned to Hanan who then moved to a government home. Yet her problems were far from over.

"The lawyers at the shelter knew of the danger to me and asked if I wanted to get engaged to this man – then I could get married and later divorce him – and tell my family that my 'honour' was intact. I could say I got married, had a child and then legally divorced my husband. The lawyers went to my rapist to arrange our marriage. He was still in prison and denied he had done anything to me. Then he agreed he had taken me – but said it was consensual! But eventually he confessed and signed a paper saying that I could do whatever I wanted with my baby. He also agreed to marry me.

"So a day came when my father and I went to court and we saw the rapist passing us with some policemen. But when we got married, on 20 October 2008, we didn't see each other. At this point I could keep Omar. I stayed in the shelter for a month after we were married. Everything was legal. So I went back to my father's place and we had a normal life. I kept visiting the Women's Union; they were trying to get a birth certificate for the baby and this took a year. The rapist – yes, the man I married – is now out of prison." Hanan has just told her mother and sisters of her ordeal. Her brothers still know nothing.

"I have told them I work in an orphanage, looking after children," Hanan says. "When I go to see the family, I take Omar with me and say he is a boy from the orphanage. They believe he is an orphan who is attached to me, but my brothers keep asking questions. Why is the boy with me all the time? Where is his family? They see him every two weeks or so and keep asking. Later, when I am divorced, I will tell my brothers the whole story. I think they will accept it. I will tell them that the union helped me and that everything is now legal. My mother and my sisters accept it, although they are sad. It was my father's idea that we should tell my brothers after I'm divorced."

Hanan smiles, more in hope than from conviction, I suspect. The women who helped her are also heroines, but they too are still concerned for her. "Without the Women's Union, if these people hadn't helped me, I would be dead – dead financially, dead psychologically and dead physically", Hanan says. "But God didn't want life to be unfair to me. Now the story has ended, thank God."

Hanan plans to tell her brothers – once she is divorced – that her former husband is in prison for raping her, that legal justice has been done, that she was married to him, that she divorced him, that "honour" has been preserved. But the brothers will know, of course, that she was raped before her marriage. Will this satisfy family "honour"? Hanan has fought her first battle – she decided to keep Omar – and now faces a much more serious one. Not that Omar would understand. The two-year-old struggles down from his plastic chair and demands chocolates. But given his mother's painful struggle, what world has he been born into?

The crimewave that shames the world

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

It's one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of 'honour'. Nor is the problem confined to the Middle East: the contagion is spreading rapidly

It is a tragedy, a horror, a crime against humanity. The details of the murders – of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the "honour" of their families – are as barbaric as they are shameful. Many women's groups in the Middle East and South-west Asia suspect the victims are at least four times the United Nations' latest world figure of around 5,000 deaths a year. Most of the victims are young, many are teenagers, slaughtered under a vile tradition that goes back hundreds of years but which now spans half the globe.

A 10-month investigation by The Independent in Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank has unearthed terrifying details of murder most foul. Men are also killed for "honour" and, despite its identification by journalists as a largely Muslim practice, Christian and Hindu communities have stooped to the same crimes. Indeed, the "honour" (or ird) of families, communities and tribes transcends religion and human mercy. But voluntary women's groups, human rights organisations, Amnesty International and news archives suggest that the slaughter of the innocent for "dishonouring" their families is increasing by the year.

Iraqi Kurds, Palestinians in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey appear to be the worst offenders but media freedoms in these countries may over-compensate for the secrecy which surrounds "honour" killings in Egypt – which untruthfully claims there are none – and other Middle East nations in the Gulf and the Levant. But honour crimes long ago spread to Britain, Belgium, Russia and Canada and many other nations. Security authorities and courts across much of the Middle East have connived in reducing or abrogating prison sentences for the family murder of women, often classifying them as suicides to prevent prosecutions.

It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes. How should one react to a man – this has happened in both Jordan and Egypt – who rapes his own daughter and then, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the "honour" of his family? Or the Turkish father and grandfather of a 16-year-old girl, Medine Mehmi, in the province of Adiyaman, who was buried alive beneath a chicken coop in February for "befriending boys"? Her body was found 40 days later, in a sitting position and with her hands tied.

Or Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, 13, who in Somalia in 2008, in front of a thousand people, was dragged to a hole in the ground – all the while screaming, "I'm not going – don't kill me" – then buried up to her neck and stoned by 50 men for adultery? After 10 minutes, she was dug up, found to be still alive and put back in the hole for further stoning. Her crime? She had been raped by three men and, fatally, her family decided to report the facts to the Al-Shabab militia that runs Kismayo. Or the Al-Shabab Islamic "judge" in the same country who announced the 2009 stoning to death of a woman – the second of its kind the same year – for having an affair? Her boyfriend received a mere 100 lashes.

Or the young woman found in a drainage ditch near Daharki in Pakistan, "honour" killed by her family as she gave birth to her second child, her nose, ears and lips chopped off before being axed to death, her first infant lying dead among her clothes, her newborn's torso still in her womb, its head already emerging from her body? She was badly decomposed; the local police were asked to bury her. Women carried the three to a grave, but a Muslim cleric refused to say prayers for her because it was "irreligious" to participate in the namaz-e-janaza prayers for "a cursed woman and her illegitimate children".

So terrible are the details of these "honour" killings, and so many are the women who have been slaughtered, that the story of each one might turn horror into banality. But lest these acts – and the names of the victims, when we are able to discover them – be forgotten, here are the sufferings of a mere handful of women over the past decade, selected at random, country by country, crime after crime.

Last March, Munawar Gul shot and killed his 20-year-old sister, Saanga, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, along with the man he suspected was having "illicit relations" with her, Aslam Khan.

In August of 2008, five women were buried alive for "honour crimes" in Baluchistan by armed tribesmen; three of them – Hameeda, Raheema and Fauzia – were teenagers who, after being beaten and shot, were thrown still alive into a ditch where they were covered with stones and earth. When the two older women, aged 45 and 38, protested, they suffered the same fate. The three younger women had tried to choose their own husbands. In the Pakistani parliament, the MP Israrullah Zehri referred to the murders as part of a "centuries-old tradition" which he would "continue to defend".

In December 2003, a 23-year-old woman in Multan, identified only as Afsheen, was murdered by her father because, after an unhappy arranged marriage, she ran off with a man called Hassan who was from a rival, feuding tribe. Her family was educated – they included civil servants, engineers and lawyers. "I gave her sleeping pills in a cup of tea and then strangled her with a dapatta [a long scarf, part of a woman's traditional dress]," her father confessed. He told the police: "Honour is the only thing a man has. I can still hear her screams, she was my favourite daughter. I want to destroy my hands and end my life." The family had found Afsheen with Hassan in Rawalpindi and promised she would not be harmed if she returned home. They were lying.

Zakir Hussain Shah slit the throat of his daughter Sabiha, 18, at Bara Kau in June 2002 because she had "dishonoured" her family. But under Pakistan's notorious qisas law, heirs have powers to pardon a murderer. In this case, Sabiha's mother and brother "pardoned" the father and he was freed. When a man killed his four sisters in Mardan in the same year, because they wanted a share of his inheritance, his mother "pardoned" him under the same law. In Sarghoda around the same time, a man opened fire on female members of his family, killing two of his daughters. Yet again, his wife – and several other daughters wounded by him – "pardoned" the murderer because they were his heirs.

Outrageously, rape is also used as a punishment for "honour" crimes. In Meerwala village in the Punjab in 2002, a tribal "jury" claimed that an 11-year-old boy from the Gujar tribe, Abdul Shakoor, had been walking unchaperoned with a 30-year-old woman from the Mastoi tribe, which "dishonoured" the Mastois. The tribal elders decided that to "return" honour to the group, the boy's 18-year-old sister, Mukhtaran Bibi, should be gang-raped. Her father, warned that all the female members of his family would be raped if he did not bring Mukhtar to them, dutifully brought his daughter to this unholy "jury". Four men, including one of the "jury", immediately dragged the girl to a hut and raped her while up to a hundred men laughed and cheered outside. She was then forced to walk naked through the village to her home. It took a week before the police even registered the crime – as a "complaint".

Acid attacks also play their part in "honour" crime punishments. The Independent itself gave wide coverage in 2001 to a Karachi man called Bilal Khar who poured acid over his wife Fakhra Yunus's face after she left him and returned to her mother's home in the red-light area of the city. The acid fused her lips, burned off her hair, melted her breasts and an ear, and turned her face into "a look of melted rubber". That same year, a 20-year-old woman called Hafiza was shot twice by her brother, Asadullah, in front of a dozen policemen outside a Quetta courthouse because she had refused to follow the tradition of marrying her dead husband's elder brother. She had then married another man, Fayyaz Moon, but police arrested the girl and brought her back to her family in Quetta on the pretext that the couple could formally marry there. But she was forced to make a claim that Fayaz had kidnapped and raped her. It was when she went to court to announce that her statement was made under pressure – and that she still regarded Fayaz as her husband – that Asadullah murdered her. He handed his pistol to a police constable who had witnessed the killing.

One of the most terrible murders in 1999 was that of a mentally retarded 16-year-old, Lal Jamilla Mandokhel, who was reportedly raped by a junior civil servant in Parachinar in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Her uncle filed a complaint with the police but handed Lal over to her tribe, whose elders decided she should be killed to preserve tribal "honour". She was shot dead in front of them. Arbab Khatoon was raped by three men in the Jacobabad district. She filed a complaint with the police. Seven hours later, she was murdered by relatives who claimed she had "dishonoured" them by reporting the crime.

Over 10 years ago, Pakistan's Human Rights Commission was recording "honour" killings at the rate of a thousand a year. But if Pakistan seems to have the worst track record of "honour" crimes – and we must remember that many countries falsely claim to have none – Turkey might run a close second. According to police figures between 2000 and 2006, a reported 480 women – 20 per cent of them between the ages of 19 and 25 – were killed in "honour" crimes and feuds. Other Turkish statistics, drawn up more than five years ago by women's groups, suggest that at least 200 girls and women are murdered every year for "honour". These figures are now regarded as a vast underestimate. Many took place in Kurdish areas of the country; an opinion poll found that 37 per cent of Diyabakir's citizens approved of killing a woman for an extramarital affair. Medine Mehmi, the girl who was buried alive, lived in the Kurdish town of Kahta.

In 2006, authorities in the Kurdish area of South-east Anatolia were recording that a woman tried to commit suicide every few weeks on the orders of her family. Others were stoned to death, shot, buried alive or strangled. A 17-year-old woman called Derya who fell in love with a boy at her school received a text message from her uncle on her mobile phone. It read: "You have blackened our name. Kill yourself and clean our shame or we will kill you first." Derya's aunt had been killed by her grandfather for an identical reason. Her brothers also sent text messages, sometimes 15 a day. Derya tried to carry out her family's wishes. She jumped into the Tigris river, tried to hang herself and slashed her wrists – all to no avail. Then she ran away to a women's shelter.

It took 13 years before Murat Kara, 40, admitted in 2007 that he had fired seven bullets into his younger sister after his widowed mother and uncles told him to kill her for eloping with her boyfriend. Before he murdered his sister in the Kurdish city of Dyabakir, neighbours had refused to talk to Murat Kara and the imam said he was disobeying the word of God if he did not kill his sister. So he became a murderer. Honour restored.

In his book Women In The Grip Of Tribal Customs, a Turkish journalist, Mehmet Farac, records the "honour" killing of five girls in the late 1990s in the province of Sanliurfa. Two of them – one was only 12 – had their throats slit in public squares, two others had tractors driven over them, the fifth was shot dead by her younger brother. One of the women who had her throat cut was called Sevda Gok. Her brothers held her arms down as her adolescent cousin cut her throat.


But the "honour" killing of women is not a uniquely Kurdish crime, even if it is committed in rural areas of the country. In 2001, Sait Kina stabbed his 13-year-old daughter to death for talking to boys in the street. He attacked her in the bathroom with an axe and a kitchen knife. When the police discovered her corpse, they found the girl's head had been so mutilated that the family had tied it together with a scarf. Sait Kina told the police: "I have fulfilled my duty."

In the same year, an Istanbul court reduced a sentence against three brothers from life imprisonment to between four and 12 years after they threw their sister to her death from a bridge after accusing her of being a prostitute. The court concluded that her behaviour had "provoked" the murder. For centuries, virginity tests have been considered a normal part of rural tradition before a woman's marriage. In 1998, when five young women attempted suicide before these tests, the Turkish family affairs minister defended mandated medical examinations for girls in foster homes.

British Kurdish Iraqi campaigner Aso Kamal, of the Doaa Network Against Violence, believes that between 1991 and 2007, 12,500 women were murdered for reasons of "honour" in the three Kurdish provinces of Iraq alone – 350 of them in the first seven months of 2007, for which there were only five convictions. Many women are ordered by their families to commit suicide by burning themselves with cooking oil. In Sulimaniya hospital in 2007, surgeons were treating many women for critical burns which could never have been caused by cooking "accidents" as the women claimed. One patient, Sirwa Hassan, was dying of 86 per cent burns. She was a Kurdish mother of three from a village near the Iranian border. In 2008, a medical officer in Sulimaniya told the AFP news agency that in May alone, 14 young women had been murdered for "honour" crimes in 10 days. In 2000, Kurdish authorities in Sulimaniya had decreed that "the killing or abuse of women under the pretext of cleansing 'shame' is not considered to be a mitigating excuse". The courts, they said, could not apply an old 1969 law "to reduce the penalty of the perpetrator". The new law, of course, made no difference.

But again, in Iraq, it is not only Kurds who believe in "honour" killings. In Tikrit, a young woman in the local prison sent a letter to her brother in 2008, telling him that she had become pregnant after being raped by a prison guard. The brother was permitted to visit the prison, walked into the cell where his now visibly pregnant sister was held, and shot her dead to spare his family "dishonour". The mortuary in Baghdad took DNA samples from the woman's foetus and also from guards at the Tikrit prison. The rapist was a police lieutenant-colonel. The reason for the woman's imprisonment was unclear. One report said the colonel's family had "paid off" the woman's relatives to escape punishment.

In Basra in 2008, police were reporting that 15 women a month were being murdered for breaching "Islamic dress codes". One 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was beaten to death by her father two years ago because she had become infatuated with a British soldier. Another, Shawbo Ali Rauf, 19, was taken by her family to a picnic in Dokan and shot seven times because they had found an unfamiliar number on her mobile phone.

In Nineveh, Du'a Khalil Aswad was 17 when she was stoned to death by a mob of 2,000 men for falling in love with a man outside her tribe.

In Jordan, women's organisations say that per capita, the Christian minority in this country of just over five million people are involved in more "honour" killings than Muslims – often because Christian women want to marry Muslim men. But the Christian community is loath to discuss its crimes and the majority of known cases of murder are committed by Muslims. Their stories are wearily and sickeningly familiar. Here is Sirhan in 1999, boasting of the efficiency with which he killed his young sister, Suzanne. Three days after the 16-year-old had told police she had been raped, Sirhan shot her in the head four times. "She committed a mistake, even if it was against her will," he said. "Anyway, it's better to have one person die than to have the whole family die of shame." Since then, a deeply distressing pageant of "honour" crimes has been revealed to the Jordanian public, condemned by the royal family and slowly countered with ever tougher criminal penalties by the courts.

Yet in 2001, we find a 22-year-old Jordanian man strangling his 17-year-old married sister – the 12th murder of its kind in seven months – because he suspected her of having an affair. Her husband lived in Saudi Arabia. In 2002, Souad Mahmoud strangled his own sister for the same reason. She had been forced to marry her lover – but when the family found out she had been pregnant before her wedding, they decided to execute her.

In 2005, three Jordanians stabbed their 22-year-old married sister to death for taking a lover. After witnessing the man enter her home, the brothers stormed into the house and killed her. They did not harm her lover.

By March 2008, the Jordanian courts were still treating "honour" killings leniently. That month, the Jordanian Criminal Court sentenced two men for killing close female relatives "in a fit of fury" to a mere six months and three months in prison. In the first case, a husband had found a man in his home with his wife and suspected she was having an affair. In the second, a man shot dead his 29-year-old married sister for leaving home without her husband's consent and "talking to other men on her mobile phone". In 2009, a Jordanian man confessed to stabbing his pregnant sister to death because she had moved back to her family after an argument with her husband; the brother believed she was "seeing other men".


And so it goes on. Three men in Amman stabbing their 40-year-old divorced sister 15 times last year for taking a lover; a Jordanian man charged with stabbing to death his daughter, 22, with a sword because she was pregnant outside wedlock. Many of the Jordanian families were originally Palestinian. Nine months ago, a Palestinian stabbed his married sister to death because of her "bad behaviour". But last month, the Amman criminal court sentenced another sister-killer to 10 years in prison, rejecting his claim of an "honour" killing – but only because there were no witnesses to his claim that she had committed adultery.

In "Palestine" itself, Human Rights Watch has long blamed the Palestinian police and justice system for the near-total failure to protect women in Gaza and the West Bank from "honour" killings. Take, for example, the 17-year-old girl who was strangled by her older brother in 2005 for becoming pregnant – by her own father.

He was present during her murder. She had earlier reported her father to the police. They neither arrested nor interrogated him. In the same year, masked Hamas gunmen shot dead a 20-year-old, Yusra Azzami, for "immoral behaviour" as she spent a day out with her fiancée. Azzami was a Hamas member, her husband-to-be a member of Fatah. Hamas tried to apologise and called the dead woman a "martyr" – to the outrage of her family. Yet only last year, long after Hamas won the Palestinian elections and took over the Gaza Strip, a Gaza man was detained for bludgeoning his daughter to death with an iron chain because he discovered she owned a mobile phone on which he feared she was talking to a man outside the family. He was later released.

Even in liberal Lebanon, there are occasional "honour" killings, the most notorious that of a 31-year-old woman, Mona Kaham, whose father entered her bedroom and cut her throat after learning she had been made pregnant by her cousin. He walked to the police station in Roueiss in the southern suburbs of Beirut with the knife still in his hand. "My conscience is clear," he told the police. "I have killed to clean my honour." Unsurprisingly, a public opinion poll showed that 90.7 per cent of the Lebanese public opposed "honour" crimes. Of the few who approved of them, several believed that it helped to limit interreligious marriage.

Syria reflects the pattern of Lebanon. While civil rights groups are demanding a stiffening of the laws against women-killers, government legislation only raised the term of imprisonment for men who kill female relatives for extramarital sex to two years. Among the most recent cases was that of Lubna, a 17-year-old living in Homs, murdered by her family because she fled to her sister's house after refusing to marry a man they had chosen for her. They also believed – wrongly – that she was no longer a virgin.

Tribal feuds often provoke "honour" killings in Iran and Afghanistan. In Iran, for example, a governor's official in the ethnic Arab province of Khuzestan stated in 2003 that 45 young women under the age of 20 had been murdered in "honour" killings in just two months, none of which brought convictions. All were slaughtered because of the girl's refusal to agree to an arranged marriage, failing to abide by Islamic dress code or suspected of having contacts with men outside the family.

Through the dark veil of Afghanistan's village punishments, we glimpse just occasionally the terror of teenage executions. When Siddiqa, who was only 19, and her 25-year-old fiancé Khayyam were brought before a Taliban-approved religious court in Kunduz province this month, their last words were: "We love each other, no matter what happens." In the bazaar at Mulla Quli, a crowd – including members of both families – stoned to death first Siddiqa, then Khayyam.

A week earlier, a woman identified as Bibi Sanubar, a pregnant widow, was lashed a hundred times and then shot in the head by a Taliban commander. In April of last year, Taliban gunmen executed by firing squad a man and a girl in Nimruz for eloping when the young woman was already engaged to someone else. History may never disclose how many hundreds of women – and men – have suffered a similar fates at the hands of deeply traditional village families or the Taliban.


But the contagion of "honour" crimes has spread across the globe, including acid attacks on women in Bangladesh for refusing marriages. In one of the most terrible Hindu "honour" killings in India this year, an engaged couple, Yogesh Kumar and Asha Saini, were murdered by the 19-year-old bride-to-be's family because her fiancée was of lower caste. They were apparently tied up and electrocuted to death.

A similar fate awaited 18-year-old Vishal Sharma, a Hindu Brahmin, who wanted to marry Sonu Singh, a 17- year-old Jat – an "inferior" caste which is usually Muslim. The couple were hanged and their bodies burned in Uttar Pradesh. Three years earlier, a New Delhi court had sentenced to death five men for killing another couple who were of the same sub-caste, which in the eyes of the local "caste council" made them brother and sister.

In Chechnya, Russia's chosen President, Ramzan Kadyrov, has been positively encouraging men to kill for "honour". When seven murdered women were found in Grozny, shot in the head and chest, Kadyrov announced – without any proof, but with obvious approval – that they had been killed for living "an immoral life". Commenting on a report that a Chechen girl had called the police to complain of her abusive father, he suggested the man should be able to murder his daughter. "... if he doesn't kill her, what kind of man is he? He brings shame on himself!"

And so to the "West", as we like to call it, where immigrant families have sometimes brought amid their baggage the cruel traditions of their home villages: an Azeri immigrant charged in St Petersburg for hiring hitmen to kill his daughter because she "flouted national tradition" by wearing a miniskirt; near the Belgian city of Charleroi, Sadia Sheikh shot dead by her brother, Moussafa, because she refused to marry a Pakistani man chosen by her family; in the suburbs of Toronto, Kamikar Kaur Dhillon slashes his Punjabi daughter-in-law, Amandeep, across the throat because she wants to leave her arranged marriage, perhaps for another man. He told Canadian police that her separation would "disgrace the family name".

And, of course, we should perhaps end this catalogue of crime in Britain, where only in the past few years have we ourselves woken to the reality of "honour" crimes; of Surjit Athwal, a Punjabi Sikh woman murdered on the orders of her London-based mother-in-law for trying to escape a violent marriage; of 15-year-old Tulay Goren, a Turkish Kurd from north London, tortured and murdered by her Shia Muslim father because she wished to marry a Sunni Muslim man; of Heshu Yones, 16, stabbed to death by her father in 2005 for going out with a Christian boy; of Caneze Riaz, burned alive by her husband in Accrington, along with their four children – the youngest 10 years old – because of their "Western ways". Mohamed Riaz was a Muslim Pakistani from the North-West Frontier Province. He died of burns two days after the murders.

Scotland Yard long ago admitted it would have to review over a hundred deaths, some going back more than a decade, which now appear to have been "honour" killings.

These are just a few of the murders, a few names, a small selection of horror stories across the world to prove the pervasive, spreading infection of what must be recognised as a mass crime, a tradition of family savagery that brooks no merciful intervention, no state law, rarely any remorse.

Surjit Athwal

Murdered in 1998 by her in-laws on a trip to the Indian Punjab for daring to seek a divorce from an unhappy marriage

Du'a Khalil Aswad

Aged 17, she was stoned to death in Nineveh, Iraq, by a mob of 2,000 men for falling in love with a man outside her tribe

Rand Abdel-Qader

The Iraqi 17-year-old was stabbed to death by her father two years ago after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra

Fakhra Khar

In 2001 in Karachi, her husband poured acid on her face, after she left him and returned to her mother's home in the red-light district of the city

Mukhtaran Bibi

The 18-year-old was gang-raped by four men in a hut in the Punjab in 2002, while up to 100 men laughed and cheered outside

Heshu Yones

The 16-year-old was stabbed to death by her Muslim father Abdullah, in west London in 2002, because he disapproved of her Christian boyfriend

Tasleem Solangi

The Pakistani village girl, 17, was falsely accused of immorality and had dogs set on her as a punishment before she was shot dead by in-laws

Shawbo Ali Rauf

Aged 19, she was taken by her family to a picnic in Dokan, Iraq, and shot seven times after they had found an unfamiliar number on her phone

Tulay Goren

The 15-year-old Kurdish girl was killed in north London by her father because the family objected to her choice of husband

Banaz Mahmod Babakir Agha

The 20-year-old's father and uncle murdered her in 2007, after she fell in love with a man her family did not want her to marry

Ayesha Baloch

Accused of having sexual relations with another man before she married, her husband slit her lip and nostril with a knife in Pakistan in 2006