Honour Crimes

747 Words2 Pages

Within the Pakistani and Afghani cultures, when a crime is committed or suspected, the family of the perpetrators must suffer some dishonor in retaliation. Often this retaliation occurs in the form of abuse or the killing of someone within their family, usually a woman. This is referred to as an honour crime or an honour killing. In Western cultures this is deemed unacceptable and against the values of the human race. Although we, as individuals living in Western society find this practice morally abhorrent, we have no reasonable basis on which to condemn it. We can never really say whether or not a cultural practice is acceptable unless we are able to rid ourselves of our preconceptions and biases. Ridding ourselves of the preconceptions, however, is impossible. This is because; the values one has are dependent on the environment we are exposed to within our culture, the norms of behavior we accept come from the institutions also formed within a particular culture and the cultural bias that taints our opinions of other cultures and the practices.

Values are defined as the ideas that are important in life. Within a culture the accepted cultural values vary over time. In many Western societies, human life has become valued over everything else. However, in some Middle-eastern cultures a family’s honour is considered more important than one person’s life, thus leading to the committing of honour crimes. One woman, Mukhtar Mai, wrote about her experience with honour crimes in the book ‘In the Name of Honour’2. Her younger brother was accused of raping a woman from another family and so in retaliation, her father offered her up to the opposing family. She was raped by four men and then thrown out into the night. In this way, her enti...

... middle of paper ...

...ay in what happens and therefore is punished whereas the man is simply accepted and moves on. Because of the cultural bias one forms, it is impossible to form an unbiased view of another culture.

Honour crimes, while viewed as acceptable by the cultures and societies that commit them are viewed as unacceptable by many people within other cultures. One cannot, however, state that one culture is unacceptable due to the preconceptions given to them through the values, norms, artefacts and institutions of another that create a cultural bias. One cannot state from within that a culture is right any more than one outside the culture can say it is wrong as there is no rational way to prove one’s statement upon the subject of any supposedly unacceptable practices.

Works Cited

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_bias

2. Mukhtar Mai, Simon & Schuster, 2007 - 192 pages

More about Honour Crimes

Open Document