The Pathology of Honor Killings
The National Post has this article by Barbara Kay on Canadian honor killings:
The deaths of Montreal teenagers Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, along with their “auntie,” their father’s first wife, bring to something like 17 or 18 the official number of murders in Canada allegedly motivated by the need to redress family honour. Now on trial for their murders are their father, brother and mother.
As immigration from countries dominated by honour codes proceeds apace, it’s likely that there will be more such killings. As is typical, it was the Shafia girls’ Canadian social life — mall-surfing, open flirting, boyfriends — that reportedly triggered parental alarm over their family’s honour. And as we saw in the iconic 2007 case of Toronto’s Aqsa Parvez, the 16-year-old girl murdered by her father and brother after an eerily similar trajectory, the victim’s appeals to teachers, social workers and police — even though taken seriously — were no match for the determined machinations of her honour-obsessed family.
