There are some very active women’s organizations and international units attempting to curb abuse of and violence against women. They work to bring awareness to the cultural, and sometimes religious, norms, laws, and practices that have created and preserve these conditions. But those efforts are too small-scale. This violence still occurs in many countries in the world, and it is most prevalent, especially in its most acute forms, in countries with a predominantly Muslim population. What is needed is a large-scale attack by national governments and international organizations.
At the base of this violence is the concept of honor, which women supposedly embody. Because of their lack of education and empowerment, women affected by this concept have rarely been able to challenge the nature and consequences of it.
Women are said to dishonor the community; family; and, for Muslim women, perhaps the Islamic religion if their actual or perceived behavior is regarded as violating ingrained cultural or religious norms. They may do this by obvious acts of sexual indiscretions, but also by not abiding by instructions and demands of men, family, or community, such as refusal to enter into an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, or even wearing Western-type clothes. Sometimes “honor” has been even more misused to refer to disagreements over inheritance or to prevent women from marrying someone they have freely chosen.
Violence against women takes many forms: verbal abuse and physical beatings; being stoned or burned; disfigurement by acid; threats; false imprisonment; sexual abuse; forced marriages, in which the female is threatened to enter a marriage against her own will; female genital mutilation; and at the most extreme, murder, or “honor-killing.”
The custom of honor killings of women in Arab Muslim societies is well-known. Among many others, Phyllis Chesler, in an important article, “Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?” (Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2009), pointed out that this kind of murder of women differed significantly from common domestic violence and that this is part of Islamic culture.
The United Nations Population Fund estimates — certainly an underestimate — that 5,000 women are killed each year for “dishonoring” their families. UNICEF calculates that about two-thirds of all killings in Palestinian territories are honor-killings. In those territories, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 54 women were killed between 2007 and 2010, and 25 have been murdered in 2013.
Law in the patriarchal Arab countries, as in the Ottoman Empire, has sustained the cultural tradition that women have an inferior status. Men are only mildly punished or not punished at all for murdering a female relative whose behavior is judged as bringing dishonor to the family.