Google "Honor Killings in America" and see story after story on the subject. It's a subject nobody likes to talk about. Here is one from FORBES last summer.
Beyond Honor Killings - Forbes.com
"Honor killings," someone wrote recently in an online forum, "have arrived in America."
Not really.
In fact, honor killings have been going on in the Muslim communities of America for years. They haven't just newly arrived: We're only starting to know about them--in part because my colleagues in the media are only now summoning the courage to admit it. Over the last two months Marie Claire, which four years ago rejected an article on the subject, ran a major feature about an American Muslim woman at risk; and Fox News rebroadcast the 2008 documentary Murder in the Family: Honor Killings in America. But as the Fox program notes, investigators were already handling honor killing incidents in 1989, and likely even before that. In all cases, the victims were daughters, wives or sisters, killed by fathers (sometimes mothers), husbands or brothers for "dishonoring" the family: by requesting a divorce, by dating before marriage, by refusing to accept an arranged spouse, by having non-Muslim friends.
What no one mentions, however, is the other dirty secret of Muslim families, even in the West: honor violence--the abuse that results not in death, but devastation. Tantamount, at times, to torture, honor violence occurs far more frequently than honor killings, with effects that in some ways could be described as worse.
How bad is it? In 2008 British studies counted nearly 17,000 incidents of honor violence annually, including kidnappings, sexual abuse and murder. Every week, according to an article in the Independent, British organizations rescued three girls from Islamabad--some of them as young as 11--sent there by their parents to be married. These girls often are raped by their much older husbands, who may also use the marriage to immigrate to Europe, continuing the abusive treatment of their brides there as well. Usually, too, the daughters of such couples are kept at home, forbidden to live the lives of Western women, and in turn, married off themselves, probably to a family cousin also in Islamabad--and so the chain continues.
And these are often the luckier ones. Others, including boys, have suffered physical abuses beyond the imagination: Last summer Muslims forced a young (non-Muslim) man in east London to drink sulfuric acid, poured more acid on his back and blinded him with bricks. His crime: being accused of having a relationship with a married Pakistani Muslim woman. Both she and he deny that they are lovers.
It is a vague term, "honor violence." But it is not, as some might argue, equivalent to domestic abuse; and it is crucial to stop equating the two, both for the sake of the victims and in order to better identify--and prosecute--the abusers.
Unlike domestic violence, honor violence revolves around a set of religious codes, aimed at depriving women (and sometimes men) of freedom and at subjugating free will. As one Dutch-Afghan woman put it when a neighbor was murdered by her husband: "She deserved it. She knew the rules."
More importantly, honor violence--and honor killings--carry a seal of approval from the family and community at large: Indeed, often those who beat their daughters or lock them in their rooms, or burn their faces to disfigure them, do so reluctantly, under pressure from the family. And therefore it becomes perhaps the most underreported crime in the West--including the U.S.
But it is being recorded--by organizations such as the Washington, D.C.-based Tahiri Center, and by New York's Sakhi Center, which recently found that over 40% of the South Asian women living around Boston had suffered family violence--a figure far higher than that found in the rest of the region's female population. Often that violence revolves around dowry issues, and takes place within the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, as well as in Indian Hindu families.
So why does the public at large know so little about it?
Enter the political correctness of the media, of editors who refuse to state the true religious motivations behind such despicable crimes, who treat them like "ordinary" domestic violence cases, or--worse--refuse to cover them at all.
But the truth is: Where there are honor killings, there is violence--and more of it than we know. When reports of honor violence rose from 60 incidents in one tiny region of the Netherlands in 2007 to 85 in 2009, it was not because the number of incidents had increased, but because public and official awareness (and therefore, the ability to identify them) had improved.
The same is true in America. Just as we are fast discovering--thanks to the efforts of Muslim-American terrorists like James Cromitie (who plotted the bombing of New York synagogues), Nadal Malik Hasan (the "Fort Hood shooter"), and Faisal Shahzad (who attempted to set off a bomb in Times Square)--that radical Islam is alive and well in the U.S., we can be certain that the doctrines that preside over radical Muslim families exist here, too. And they will continue to until--as is happening in Europe--my colleagues in the media find the courage, at last, to say so.
Abigail R. Esman is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands. Her most recent book isRadical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West."
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