Dishonourable Killings

Thousands of women are killed each year for ‘offending’ traditional ‘morality’, and authorities are struggling to put a stop to it.
 

- Warren Roberston

THE sms from her best friend chilled Laila to the bone. Written in broken text speak, it hinted that all might not be well with her best friend Samia Shahid’s trip to visit family in Pakistan. Based in the UK, Samia should have been excited to see her family back in her home country, but the text suggested otherwise: “Pray I come bk alive on 21jult my psyco cuzzan u see.”

The ‘psycho cousin’ she speaks about also happened to be her ex-husband, and police believe he had been making threats toward her since she had divorced him to marry the new love of her life, Syed Mukhtar Kazam. When she was found dead in the family’s ancestral village of Pandori, in the state of Punjab, on July 20, police were quick to say she died of natural causes. Her new husband, however, would not let it rest, and openly declared to all who would listen that she had become a victim of her own family, whom he believed had killed her for supposedly bringing shame onto them by first divorcing the cousin and then marrying him.

According to Pakistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission nearly 1 100 women were killed in Pakistan in 2015 by relatives who believed they had dishonoured their families. In its annual report the commission said 900 more women suffered sexual violence and nearly 800 took, or tried to take, their own lives. In 2014 about 1 000 women died in honour-related attacks and 869 in 2013.

Correspondents, however, believe that the vast majority of such crimes go unreported in Pakistan, and that the problem is much worse than the commission believes.