Past in Present

Hello folks,

I will be using British spelling, I decided. That is how every academic journal, book, etc, writes honour.

It is another ominous day in Iowa-the clouds are hanging low and the siren earlier today went off. Since it isn't a day for frolicking or reading by the pool, I decided to blog! There will be two this week, God willing.

The subject of this post is an introduction to the book 'Honour' Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women, edited by Lynn Welchmann and Sara Hossain. It is a collection of articles on this particular issue. I will be presenting several of those articles and will be including them in my thesis.

The preface is by Radhika Coomaraswamy, United Nations Special Rapporteur. Her reports noticed that violence against women is largely a function of societies desire to control woman's sexuality. The "framework" of honour is created to regulate their behaviour. Furthermore, it is accepted as a cultural phenomenon and is often not touched. This creates a "cultural relativism." The right to life and freedom are made irrelevant in the eyes of culture.

However, CEDAW in 1979 created the terms of the "Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women" to shift the focus away from cultural relativism to a human rights issue.

Radhika's ideas include:
-the need to invoke international standards and laws to hold states responsible for these crimes...and dismiss the crutch of cultural relativism
-the development of national penal, civil, and administrative sanctions to protect families and women
-stronger criminal laws
-recognition that law-based strategies are insufficient in addressing this issue
-protection of woman's identities

If you recall, many of these ideas are parallel to the issues raised in Husseini's book.

The introduction is by Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain. The volume is a result of a honour killing in Pakistan. This reveals that this incidences of violence are impetuses for change. This is an unfortunate fact of most cases of violence.

They introduce a Coomarswamy's traditional "definition of crimes of honour...accepts the fact that structures that perpetuate violence against women are socially constructed and that such violence is a product of a historical process and is not essential or time bound in its manifestation."

We will see how this def. applies in my next post. The definition also accepts that all structures of violence that serve to defend male honour are in fact honour crimes. Essentially, they are crimes of motivation, not of passion. Furthermore, it is critical that these crimes be viewed through a wider scope. Meaning there needs to be less focus on these crimes as an "Eastern" phenomenon. The book mentions the damage caused by Khouri's book by perpetuating honour crimes as a problem "of the other."

The book agrees that a single, straight-forward approach by one acting party is not enough. Rather, to solve the problem there needs to be a collaboration from different activists, law makers and locals.

This gives you a brief idea of what variety of articles I will be engaging in.

For now, goodbye!
-Liz