No ‘honour’ in violence against women

We must change how we speak, say Amira Elghawaby and Manaal Farooqi.

Survivors of gender-based violence need to be believed and supported. They also need society to describe the harm they experience with appropriate language. Yet time and again, violence against Muslim women is framed as “honourbased,” further stigmatizing victims and the wider communities to which they belong. It’s time for this to stop. Recently, news emerged that a young Muslim woman in Gatineau had filed a complaint of domestic abuse against her father. The police called it “honour-based” violence. There is nothing honourable at all about the alleged actions of her father, nor is there anything within Islamic teachings that would condone such coercion of one’s family members, or of anyone at all.

Using “honour” to describe such cases only results in further stereotyping of Muslim or racialized households as particularly backwards, barbaric and uncivilized. It’s a failure to recognize that patriarchy, and the varieties of violence often associated with it, is a global phenomenon that exists among all communities. Violence against women is universally about power and control.

The laws describing violence against women already cover exactly what these cases involve, making it redundant to create a whole new category based on false assumptions that particular communities have specific tendencies to commit specific types of crime.

The case of alleged abuse in Gatineau has already been used as fodder by those opposed to religious freedom for women who wear niqab. In one particularly illogical argument, one columnist went as far as to suggest that defending the rights of Muslim women to wear whatever they want would actually silence any Muslim girl who might be experiencing abuse about her own wardrobe choices. On the contrary, labelling violence against women as honour-based could actually deter victims from reporting it, for a variety of reasons: They might believe they were deserving of such treatment, or might fear stigmatizing their entire family or community if they were to speak up.

Violence against women is a societal norm we need to disrupt. Every six days, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner, according to the Canadian Women’s Foundation. Additionally, research shows that seven in 10 people who experience family violence are young girls and women. This includes women who are killed because their partners fear they will commit, or have committed, adultery.

One case in Ottawa involved a man named Marc Hutt who was convicted in 2013 of brutally killing his wife. Despite having the hallmarks of an honour killing, according to a definition by Human Rights Watch, the term never entered the discourse, observed educator and columnist Aisha Sherazi. One has to wonder if it was because the perpetrator wasn’t from a stereotypical ethnic background.

Creating arbitrary categories of gendered violence won’t solve this problem. Victims must be at the centre of our preoccupation with addressing violence. That includes using language that is fair and avoids scapegoating. This isn’t only a question of semantics: Language can affect public policy as well. The previous government spent five times more money to address “honour crimes” or “harmful cultural practices” in one year than it did addressing violence against Indigenous women, despite the high numbers of missing and murdered women from these communities.

Journalists and lawyers at the New York Times recently discussed how they have been describing the explosive allegations of sexual abuse and assault by powerful men in Hollywood. “Using an evocative phrase or term to describe certain behaviour may make for more interesting reading, but it may also suggest more than we know,” wrote Christina Koningisor, the Times’s First Amendment fellow, in exploring why some terms are chosen over others. In the case of so-called honour-based violence, using the term sensationalizes rather than describes the actions involved.

Law enforcement shouldn’t label such acts this way at all, nor should journalists go along with this faulty script. Let’s call violence against women by its name and focus on eradicating it from all communities.