“Murder in the name of honor!!- Heinous and Atrocious act!”

“17 year old girl, shot dead by father in Pakistan”, Couple killed by family members after love marriage in Haryana”

These are the most published headlines these days in almost all newspapers. Honor killing or honour killing (also known as ‘customary killing’) is the most up surging catastrophe being faced not only in India but all across the world. Honor killing is the murder of a member of a family or social group by other members, due to the belief of the perpetrators (and potentially the wider community), that the victim has brought dishonor to the community. Honor killings are mostly directed against women and girls.


The perceived dishonor is generally the result of victim’s desire to marry by own choice or homosexuality. With modernization, the rate of love marriages might have gone up in the metro cities but reality remains contrary in sub-urban and rural areas. Though one has to admit that majority of the killings take place in rural areas but it has also been seen recently that even metropolitan cities like Delhi and Chennai are not untouched by this abashing crime. Thus, it is clear that honor killing has a vast geographical spread.
Honor killing is definitely a major national challenge, with individual states like Punjab reporting 35 honor killings on an average annually. Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar together report 500-600 annual honor killings on an average in the past 3 years. But, on a wide perspective this social evil is curbing the humanity globally, be it UK or Pakistan or the Middle East.
Over the course of six years, more than 4000 women have died as victims of honor killings in Pakistan from 1999 to 2004. In 2005, the average annual number of honor killings for the whole nation was stated to be more than 10,000 per year, According to women’s rights advocates, the concepts of women as a property, and of honor are so deeply entrenched in the social, economic and political fabric of Pakistan that the government mostly ignores the regular occurrences of women being killed and maimed by their families.
Every year in the UK, officials estimate that at least a dozen women are victims of honor killings, almost exclusively within Asian and Middle Eastern families. Often cases cannot be resolved due to the unwillingness of family, relatives and communities to testify. A 2006 BBC poll for the Asian network in UK found that one in ten of the 500 young Asians polled said that they could condone the murder of someone who dishonored their family.
In April 2008, it came to light that a woman had been killed in Saudi Arabia by her father a few months before for “chatting” to a man on the social networking internet site face book! A girl in Turkey was killed after her family heard a song and thought she had a boyfriend. In 2010, a 16 year girl was buried alive by relatives for befriending boys in South east Turkey, her corpse was found 40 days after she went missing. Ahmet Yildiz, 26, a Turkish psychic’s student who represented his country at National Gay Conference in the United States in 2008 was shot leaving a café in Istanbul.
The above mentioned cases are mere microscopic elaborations of this macroscopic catastrophe. In today’s modern advanced era, such mishaps are matter of contempt and derision. We, as individuals need to unite at social, communal, regional, national and global levels to eradicate this social evil. The mentalities of people all across the globe should be improvised by education and awareness. One of the major reasons of increasing cases of honor killings is that the caste system continues to prevail at its rigid best from the fundamental level of society to the international parameters. Casteism and other orthodox beliefs must be eliminated from the society entirely.


After mass revolts and scrutinizing the increasing number of honor killings, the Supreme Court of India issued notices to the Central Government and six states including UP, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan to take preventive measures against this social evil.
Alarmed by the rise of honor killings, the government planned to bring a bill in the Monsoon Session of parliament in July, 2010 to provide for deterrent punishment for honor killings. Well, its high time now, nations all across the globe must unify and buckle up to demolish this catastrophic social evil. Strict laws must be enacted and implemented more in observance than in breach, against the perpetrators of this heinous crime.
Remember…no law, no community and no ethics permit humans to write death sentences for fellow humans. Every individual has certain rights to live his/ her life and certain duties towards the society he/she is a part of.

"Where there is no shame, there is no honor, and killing is the most shameful act in the name of honor”