When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings'

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When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings'

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Fri Nov 20, 2015 3:25 pm

http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2024-when-religious-parents-kill-kids-inside-honor-killing.html

I'm sure this will definitely quell some of the anti-Muslim rancor that's rampant online.

And that may be the saddest ending to a Cracked article ever.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby Knicholas » Fri Nov 20, 2015 3:29 pm

It's a bit unfortunate that the interviewee is Muslim, since honour killings happen across many cultural and religious lines. It also says something that I felt up to facing the "ways the world will end" article before this one.

Top comments are still "I hope she is okay", with maybe a few trolls.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby sunglasses » Fri Nov 20, 2015 3:50 pm

God I hope we end up finding out she's ok.

BUT there's only a couple Azimi's from the Netherlands on Facebook and the one hasn't had any activity on it since September 2nd.

And I agree that it would be nice to hear more from other cultures in which this behavior is seen as normal.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby cmsellers » Fri Nov 20, 2015 3:55 pm

Frankly, I'm taken aback that in an article about a horrific and terrifyingly widespread cultural practice, the first reaction of many of you is to worry about hypothetical Muslim backlash, rather than the very real victims of this barbaric mindset.

Knicholas wrote:It's a bit unfortunate that the interviewee is Muslim, since honour killings happen across many cultural and religious lines.

That's overstating the case. So-called "honor killings," are heavily concentrated among two cultural groups: Kurds and South Asians from Pakistan and northern India. (Moreover, Hindus don't generally engage in "honor killings" so much as sati, which is a slightly different horrific practice.)

It's true that "honor killings" are widely practiced by Yazidi Kurds and Sikhs, but pretty much all "honor killings" from outside the two cultural areas I mentioned are done by Muslims. (Also, Alevi Kurds don't do "honor killings,: AFAIK.) The only counter-example I'm aware of was an "honor killing" of a Turkish Armenian (yes, there's still a few left), because unfortunately, under the leadership Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, "honor" killings have become increasingly popular among all Turks.

As for the article itself, it's horrifying, but also interesting to read from the perspective of someone who is the target. Usually when reading about "honor killings," the targets don't get to speak for themselves, instead you hear from family, friends, and the perpetrators.

I've been morbidly curious about "honor killings" since Turkey, when I had a very smart student with a very religious (and hypocritical) father, who wanted to study in Ankara. While I knew her, her father told her she had to go to school at a university in the town she already lived in. I asked her why she didn't apply anyways (college is basically free for Turkish students) and she said "my family will kill me," She said that a lot when I asked her about things she wanted to do (such as explore Poland when visiting her father, or or on a date with a boy she liked). I finally started to wonder if she meant it literally. I'm still not sure, but I did conclude that as a half-Kurdish woman with a very religious Sunni father, it was horrifyingly likely.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Fri Nov 20, 2015 4:01 pm

I think it's a horrible occurrence regardless of what culture or religion it's tied to.

I can't fathom even having the notion that my child must be killed in order to satisfy some flimsy honor system because holy shit he or she decided that jeans and pop music and spending time with members of the opposite sex was interesting.

And the article conveyed a very real sense of fear on the part of the subject. I hope she is ok.

But I also know that the timing of this article couldn't be much worse. And that there is a lot of content that can be severely incendiary.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby Tesseracts » Fri Nov 20, 2015 4:10 pm

Yeah, I'm with Cmsellers here. I'm somebody who has strongly opposed generalizing terrorism as a Muslim issue, but I'm totally comfortable with calling honor killings a specifically Muslim problem. Those are just the facts, unless somebody could prove otherwise.

Frankly, I'd much rather live in a world where people panic over girls being murdered over "honor" than a world which cares more about immigrants.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby sunglasses » Fri Nov 20, 2015 4:38 pm

It's hardly only a Muslim thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing

I'm slightly insulted you think I don't care about the victims, sellers and tess. This is something that haunts and horrifies me. The very notion that your family is literally disposable if they: 1. become pregnant outside of wedlock 2. date 3. refuse an arrranged marriage 4. literally any other reason sickens me. But I think that focusing only on one subset of people who kill in the name of honor is narrow.

Straight from wiki:

Widney Brown, the advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said that the practice "goes across cultures and across religions". Human rights advocates have compared "honor killing" to "crimes of passion" in Latin America (which are sometimes treated extremely leniently) and also to the killing of women for lack of dowry in India. Honor crimes occur in societies where there is an interplay between discriminatory traditions of justice and statutory law. In some countries, this discrimination is exacerbated by the inclusion of Shari'a, Islamic law, or the concept of zina (sex outside of marriage).
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby Tesseracts » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:09 pm

I'm sorry, I don't mean to say you don't care about the victims. Although I did say I'm with Sellers, and he did insinuate you don't care about the victims. I fully believe you care about the victims Sunny, I just meant I don't think it's correct to frame this as a negative stereotype about Islam. I also believe that trying to absolve Islam of responsibility isn't the most helpful thing for the victims.

I'm disappointed in the "religion" section of this Wiki article. It tells us honor killings are not permitted in the Quran, which I don't really care about. It doesn't tell us if the practice is more prevalent in Muslim communities.

If you scroll down to the Europe section, most the examples they use of honor killings are Muslim committed. The support section is about Islamic nations as well. According to one of Wiki's sources honor killings in Canada are a Muslim phenomenon.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has also studied the issue of honour killings. In a report of the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, issued March 7, 2003, it commented that:

Most of the reported cases of so-called "honour crimes" within Europe have been amongst Muslim or migrant Muslim communities. The paradox is that Islam itself does not support the death penalty for misconduct related to honour and many Islamic leaders have condemned this practice on the grounds that it has no religious basis.21


Here is my favorite part of the Wikipedia article you just linked.

Phyllis Chesler argues that the U.S., as well as in Canada, do not have proper measures in place to fight against honor killings, and do not recognize these murders as a specific form of violence, distinct from other domestic murders, due to fear of being labeled "culturally insensitive". According to her, this often prevents government officials in the United States and the media from identifying and accurately reporting these incidents as "honor killings" when they occur. Failing to accurately describe the problem makes it more difficult to develop public policies to address it, she argues.[214]


:/
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby sunglasses » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:19 pm

And that infuriates me a bit. It's not culturally insensitive to say "Don't murder your fucking kids."
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby cmsellers » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:20 pm

sunglasses wrote:I'm slightly insulted you think I don't care about the victims, sellers and tess. This is something that haunts and horrifies me. The very notion that your family is literally disposable if they: 1. become pregnant outside of wedlock 2. date 3. refuse an arrranged marriage 4. literally any other reason sickens me. But I think that focusing only on one subset of people who kill in the name of honor is narrow.

First off, I wasn't referring to you sunny. I was referring to the fact that the first two posters. In both cases, the first thing they said and the majority of their post was devoted to a merely potential backlash against Muslims the article might cause, rather than the very real and current practice of "honor killings."

Second, I don't think and wasn't saying that either BrownRecluse or Knicholas don't care about the victims, however I was taken aback that they focused on a hypothetical anti-Muslim backlash rather than on the targets of this practice. We shouldn't shy from expressing the truth merely because it might lead to other people doing bad things.

And since the majority of "honor killings" are committed by Muslims, using a non-Muslim honor killing would have been misleading as best. Your alternative choices would have been a Yazidi, a Sikh, or a culture that doesn't regularly practice honor killings. The latter would have made it seem like this isn't a systematic practice. And however ignorant people are about Islam, they know even less about Yazidism or Sikhism. (I also don't think honor killings are as common among Yazidis and Sikhs as they are among Muslims in the relevant ethnic groups, though I don't have any hard numbers for this.)

While I won't go as far as Tess in saying that "honor killings" are a Muslim issue, I do think that Islamism has encouraged their spread beyond traditional cultural factors. They went from being a mainly Kurdish thing in Turkey to becoming popular among ethnic Turks as well, and this seems to have coincided with the rise of the Islamist AKP in Turkey.

Recluse is right that that timing isn't great, but what of it? It's still something that needs to be addressed, and usually it's only addressed in the west after a Muslim man kills his female relatives. I'd say that that's an even worse time to discuss the issue.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:37 pm

Well, I stand by my sentiment that if this was dropped 5 months ago or so, the desired response would hopefully be more in the vein of "wow, this is a deplorable practice".

Dropping it now just adds another reason for the " this is why we need a national database for Muslims and holy shit they're coming for us all, blah bla blah" bullshit that I cant avoid on social media or the news or the box containing my breakfast cereal. And that deviates the conversation away from how serious this issue is. I'm not a cold hearted bastard about this.

Anyway, I think I'll just stick to the Social Cellar for a while.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby Tesseracts » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:42 pm

sunglasses wrote:And that infuriates me a bit. It's not culturally insensitive to say "Don't murder your fucking kids."

But is it culturally insensitive to acknowledge this mostly happens in Muslim communities, and this mindset is fed by patriarchal attitudes often supported by religious extremism?

Darkstrolm wrote a comment saying "revenge" or something is the motive behind the killings rather than religion. I don't agree. All people get angry, but culture tells us how it is acceptable to express our anger.

By the way, I never meant to say honor killings are only a Muslim issue, I apologize if I sounded like that. All I meant is they are mostly committed by Muslims.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby Anglerphobe » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:46 pm

At first glance I thought it said "Hodor Killings."

Spoiler: show
Image


This is the danger of US spelling.

EDIT: Spoilered for people who are behind on Game of Thrones. Anglerphobe: the candidate who cares, when he remembers to.
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Last edited by Anglerphobe on Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby ShuaiGuy » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:47 pm

<Redacted>
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Last edited by ShuaiGuy on Wed Mar 30, 2016 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: When Religious Parents Kill Kids: Inside 'Honor Killings

Postby Tesseracts » Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:49 pm

Shuai nobody said honor killings don't happen in India, or that they don't happen outside of Islam. My argument is it happens primarily within Islam.

To be clear I don't think Islamic doctrine is responsible for this culture and I think it's possible for Islamic cultures to be more humanitarian. However a lot of Muslim communities are honor based and deeply misogynist and this cannot be denied.

Honor based societies are really a horrible idea in general. The Klingons have an honor based society and they are terrible.
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