When pride is stronger than love

Every year, more than 5000 honour killings occur around the globe, 12 in the UK. These figures are severely underestimated due to a lack of reporting and recording. The latest body of the victim, 19-year-old Celine Dookhran, was found inside a fridge with her throat slit. Her crime? Bringing shame to her family by loving outside of her community.

Whilst it is still too early to know the exact details of what happened to Celine Dookhran, or who exactly was involved, all the markings of an honour killing are there. Celine was of Indian Muslim heritage and an aspiring make-up artist. Her twitter account reveals a young girl at her peak, happy and full of enthusiasm for life. Early reports claim that she was involved with an Arab man that some members her family did not approve of. In the days leading up to her murder, Celine had tweeted a message of gratitude, ‘thanking god for everything’ only to find herself brutally raped and murdered. She and another woman, who escaped, were attacked by men in balaclavas, and dragged into a vehicle. Her body was discovered inside a fridge in a house in Kingston-upon-Thames after the other victim, a 20-year-old woman, reported the incident to the police. 33-year-old, Mujahid Arshid, is charged with murder, rape and kidnapping, while 28-year-old Vincent Tappu, is charged with kidnapping.

This sort of attack against women is described as part of a growing form of abuse that occurs in many countries across the world. Organisations such as HBVA (Honour Based Violence Awareness Network) have been raising awareness on the subject but there is still a lot that goes unheard and unreported. The challenge for communities is to understand the signs of honour-based violence (HBV) before it gets to the point where innocent lives are lost. HBVA is a resource group that works and collaborates with other agencies to distribute information so that women, and sometimes men too, who suffer in silence can feel confident enough to speak about it.

They suggest that what makes an honour-based crime distinctive to other forms of domestic abuse is its collective nature, where many members of the extended family collude or hold ‘council’ typically led by a male member of the family and a senior woman, to decide the fate of the woman deemed to have brought shame to the family. HBVA describe these crimes as a phenomenon where a person (most often a woman) is subjected to violence by her collective family or community in order to restore ‘honour’, presumed to have been lost by her behaviour, perhaps through expressions of sexual autonomy. An ‘honour’ killing is the most extreme form of violence which may be expressed as a final resort, although there are other lesser responses which include forced marriage and other forms of violence.

The difficulty with HBV is that the signs might be hard to detect, because the nature of HBV is secrecy and concealment. Even professionals and public-sector workers may not have a detailed understanding of HBV, and thus will fail to detect, record or respond to the phenomenon appropriately. Police and other first points of contact might also fail to recognise the nature of HBV crimes and abuse, categorising them as domestic violence rather than comprehending their ideological and collective basis.

While it is welcome news, that there is now more awareness of honour killings and HBV, much more needs to be done to address the issue for what it is. It is also worth understanding that this type of inter-personal violence is not limited to particular cultures or to particular religions. It most often occurs within patriarchal and male-dominated communities, but it can also develop independent of religion and culture, in settings that are not constrained by ideological motivations and gender bias. The challenge is to continue to raise awareness of the subject and emphasise it for what it is, which is murder, leading from collective and consensual violence against women.