Barbara Kay: Action on honour killings

Barbara Kay has done the human rights community another service with her recent column "Action on honour killings". She defines and differentiates between cultural violence (in the form of honor killings which are primarily directed at women and girls in an attempt to enforce social/cultural standards) and domestic violence which affects everyone. Both are serious issues which need attention, but as most men's activists know any issue that can be used to politicize domestic violence gets altogether too much free press. Excerpt:

'Domestic violence, or “Intimate Partner Violence (IPV),” as the latter name more precisely defines it, is a problem between two adults — both heterosexual and homosexual — who have difficulty dealing with intimacy issues and lash out at their partners. The violence may be initiated by either party, and carries no ideological implications. The problem is not cultural, but psychological in origin, and, however distressing to those who are its victims, is neither a collective problem nor the result of systemic misogynistic values in Canadian culture.

Honour-related abuse, on the other hand, is a collective problem, because it is based in cultural values adhered to by whole communities. Those abused, almost invariably female, and most often daughters (not a feature of western domestic violence), are the victims of a conspiracy, sanctioned and facilitated throughout a network of kinship collaboration.'