WAIT did I just read this right mummy? Does it say the girl was burnt by her mother? – asked my 11-year-old daughter with the newspaper in hand.
My youngest sometimes picks up the paper in the morning and reads it as she has her breakfast or at times listens to the news in the background as her dad watches the news before they all set off to school.
And on this day, she just happened to come across an article about a 16-year-old girl who was burnt alive by her own mother, for marrying against the wishes of her family.
Zeenat Bibi was set on fire in Pakistan’s cultural capital of Lahore, a little over a week after she wed 20-year-old motorcycle mechanic Hasan Khan against the wishes of her family.
I tried to explain that, as much as it may sound insane to us, in some parts of the world ‘honour’ was a huge factor even to the extent of killing your own child if that honour is betrayed. “Oh my gosh mummy why would she do that? How can she do that? It’s her daughter! And she didn’t do anything wrong, she only married someone she loves,” retorted my innocent child. ‘Yes, you are right my sweet child,’ I thought. The girl had done nothing wrong, not in our eyes at least. I cannot fathom how anyone can murder another human being let alone their own child.
Now another woman in Pakistan has fallen victim to an honour killing. Qandeel Balooch’s brother strangled her for pictures she posted on Facebook.
Bibi’s mother admitted to her killing and her husband of less than a week had to bury her charred remains after none of her relatives sought to claim her body.
Recently 19-year-old Maria Sadaqat was tortured and burnt by a group of people in a village close to the holiday resort of Murree, outside the capital Islamabad, for refusing a marriage proposal from the son of a former colleague. Another woman believed to be aged between 16 and 18 was drugged, strangled and her body was burnt on the orders of a village jirga (council) in northwest Pakistan in April, allegedly for helping a friend to elope with her lover.
Yasmin Khan, director of the Halo Project, a charity tackling forced marriage and honour-based violence that deals with victims who are threatened with violence including a threat to kill, says there is a considerable under-reporting of honour killings in the UK.
“It is usually a family member who will make the initial and desperate contact with the police. However, due to the honour connotation, if the family are involved in such a crime they will shy away from making the authorities aware. It is essential we take these threats seriously and act within a multi-agency context to provide maximum safety to vulnerable individuals who are at risk,” she says.
Khan is encouraged by the Pakistani film Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, noting that: “Films, documentaries and public awareness campaigns are important in getting key messages across.” The film, that won an Oscar in March, follows the life of teenager Saba Qaiser who survived an attempted honour killing by her father and uncle, who shot her and threw her in a river after she married against their wishes.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, last year 500 people, mostly females, died in honour killings. Refusal to agree to arranged marriages and infidelity are the most common reasons while a mixed group of friends were killed in a northern Pakistan village four years ago for mingling with the opposite sex at a wedding party.
Exact numbers of victims are expected to be much higher than reported, particularly in the strictly orthodox Muslim communities of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Honour killings, committed as a way to restore the honour of a family after a relative brings them into disrepute, are incomprehensible to most people around the world.
Let us hope that laws against such atrocities are made much more effective and religious scholars and learnt peers speak out against such ridiculous and yet extremely sad wrongdoings.
And as Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who screened the film in his office recently said: “There is no honour in honour killing.”
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