Barbara Kay is on fire!
For greater clarity around domestic violence in Canada, we should use the term Inter Partner Violence (IPV), now favoured by many academics in this field. Normative IPV is violence that springs from psychologically troubled people — both men and women — who have problems dealing with intimate relationships, but have no healthy model for resolving them. Many of them have come from abusive backgrounds. Much of IPV involves alcohol, drugs or both, not the case with honour killing. IPV is usually situational and therefore spontaneous, rarely planned in advance like honour killing. Unlike honour killing, too, which invariably involves males killing females, about 50% of IPV is “assortative” — cases where damaged like seeks like — and the partners bilaterally provoke each other.
Canada’s male-on-female IPV murder numbers — about 45 women partners (not daughters) a year, low for a population of 35 million — are directly linked to an important cultural fact: Murdering women, especially their own loved ones, is anathema to healthy Western men. Unlike honour killings, such crimes are universally condemned: They are never validated, let alone encouraged in our institutions or houses of worship; indeed, all abuse of women is abominated rather than tolerated in the general culture.
We must understand above all that IPV and honour killings represent different stakes for society. IPV is not sociologically catchy: Healthy people do not take their intimate relationship cues from the pathological amongst them. Honour killing, on the other hand, is a form of ideological terrorism linked to a particular religious and cultural outlook, an implied threat to other women of what can happen if they don’t toe the party line and an emboldening “inspiration” to their male cultural peers. Like suicide bombing, another culturally induced form of hysteria, honour killing is a sick practice that can go viral if not nipped in the bud.
Cravenly ascribing the problem of honour killings to all men’s nature, which is what we do when we subsume it under the heading of domestic violence, itself misunderstood, rather than acknowledging the specific cultural matrix from which the phenomenon emerges, will only end in more dead innocent girls and women. That seems a rather high price to pay for our liberal elites’ pleasure in dancing to the vivacious gallopade of the multicultural-correctness polka.
What’s missing from this column are numbers for “honour killings” in Canada, which I’m guessing are pretty low. According to the UN (not exactly hysterically anti-Muslim people), something like 5,000 women are victims of such crimes a year around the world – mostly in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. I wonder how many women are killed by their male partners in “non-honour-killing” murders (what I gather we should call “male-of-female IPV murders”) worldwide every year.
by
Melissa says
I’m going to put something out there for you to chew on. I know very little about Muslim culture, (other than what is said in popular media) and I’m making some assumptions, but here goes:
Muslim people (especially Muslim women) are expected to conform. It stands to reason that, if a woman acts out, she will be shunned by her community, she will not snag a good Muslim husband, and she will not have much of a life within the Muslim community. Perhaps her family feels that she is better off dead, than to live a life shunned by her birth community.
I’m making this argument with my tongue in cheek, of course, and this line of thinking is rather repulsive to me. However, I’d like to point out that this line of reasoning strongly parallels the arguments for euthanasia.
Just a thought.