Honour killing, as it is widely understood, is the cold-blooded murder of a woman or a man involved with her, by the male members of her household in order to cleanse the reputation of the family, clan, community or tribe. This violent tradition in the name of religion, custom and culture continues to be carried out in a significantly large part of the world. The majority of people still believe that honour killings happen for reasons such as marriage from choice or a love affair of a kinswoman, rape, a demand for divorce from a woman, or the birth of a female child, all of which are perceived as bringing shame on the family. However, current research on honour killing suggests that there are a number of intriguing and very cleverly knitted plots of jealousy, greed, violence and murder which show that, in the name of honour, various other purposes are being served and people are killed in ways which give the impression that they are honour killings. By collecting data from people involved in such situations, this book opens a Pandora’s box, showing that such killings are carried out not to assuage the hurt honour of a patriarchal society, but to serve a variety of malign intentions, goals and agendas. It will serve to let the world comprehend the phenomenon of honour-related violence where culture and crime unite under the umbrella of highly discriminating laws against women. This book consists of twenty-six testimonies from those involved in honour killings, bringing together interviews with killers, victims and the falsely accused.

Honour killing persists around the Middle East, where regimes refrain from tackling primitive traditions for fear of sparking unrest. Ayse Onal interviewed imprisoned men in Turkey convicted of killing their mothers, sisters, and daughters. The result is a revealing and ultimately tragic account of ruined lives - both the victims' and the killers' - in a country where state and religion conspire to hush up the killing of hundreds of women every year. 'Ayse Onal has done an immense service by revealing what it is like to live in an honour-based society and the terrible cost, not just to the women who are beaten and eventually killed, but to the perpetrators and other relatives.' -- Joan Smith. 'A compelling, disturbing examination of a tradition that stubbornly persists in modern Turkey' -- Guardian

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

This volume brings together the practical insights and experiences of individuals and organisations working in diverse regions and contexts to combat 'crimes of honour'. Authors examine strategies of response to such manifestations of violence against women, focusing largely on 'honour killings' and interference with the right to choice in marriage, and the related use and legal treatment of the defence of 'honour' and 'provocation' in different countries of Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia. This timely volume is distinctive in approach and content, highlighting activist and practice-orientated academic perspectives from both the South and the North. The authors give voice to the struggle to locate 'crimes of honour' firmly within the international framework of violence against women and human rights, rather than positioning these abuses as specific to particular cultures or communities. The first of its kind, this book serves as a resource in addressing 'honour crimes' and, more broadly, violence against women, and will be of interest to a multi-disciplinary academic audience as well as to lawyers, policy-makers and activists.

“Not only is this book the best sort of true-crime writing, but it is also a stunning exploration of the concept of manhood in America” (Sebastian Junger, New York Times–bestselling author of War). Through six detailed accounts of murders involving gay men, American Honor Killings examines the facts of cases that are too often politicized, sensationalized, or simply ignored. David McConnell researched killings from small-town Alabama to San Quentin’s death row, and here recounts both notorious and lesser-known crimes. We may tend to think these stories involve either the perpetrator’s internal struggle over his own identity or a victim’s fatally miscalculated proposition. They’re almost never that simple. These riveting narratives reveal how different factors played into each case, among them ideas and beliefs about masculinity. Together, they form a secret American history of rage and desire. In each story, victims, murderers, friends, and relatives come breathtakingly alive. The result is a true-crime book of unusual power, depth, and psychological insight—“a journalistic tour de force made all the more impressive by jailhouse interviews” (Publishers Weekly). “A masterpiece of reportage . . . At turns heartbreaking and terrifying . . . If Truman Capote were alive today, he would die of envy. David McConnell has taken the mantle of great American nonfiction writer.” —Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill

Role of the Police

On the morning of June 30, 2009, police in Kingston, Ontario, made a ghastly discovery: four females dead in a car submerged in a shallow canal. Sisters Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Rona Mohammad Amir, 50, floated almost serenely inside the car, seemingly the victims of a terrible accident. That morning, Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba and their son, Hamed, arrived at the Kingston police station to report the four missing. In a sweeping covert investigation that spanned three continents, police uncovered layers of lies in the Shafias’ story and developed a horrifying theory: Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona had been the victims of a meticulously plotted family murder—Canada’s first mass honour killing. In Without Honour, award-winning journalist Rob Tripp draws on three years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews to make sense of a senseless crime in a way no other writer could. Tripp was the first journalist on the scene as the news broke and the only reporter to attend every day of court sessions, through to the convictions of Shafia, Tooba and Hamed on four counts each of first-degree murder. The Shafias are appealing. In this gripping and compassionate account, Tripp reveals the heartbreaking and stunning truth about these crimes fuelled by what Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger called a “twisted notion of honour,” and about the desperate lives of four women who died in the pursuit of freedom.

In 1998, Sarbjit Athwal was called by her husband to attend a family meeting. It looked like just another family gathering. An attractive house in west London, a large dining room, two brothers, their mother, one wife. But the subject they were discussing was anything but ordinary. At the head of the group sat the elderly mother. She stared proudly around, smiling at her children, then raised her hand for silence. ‘It’s decided then,’ the old lady announced. ‘We have to get rid of her.’ ‘Her’ was Surjit Athwal, Sarbjit’s sister-in-law. Within three weeks of that meeting, Surjit was dead: lured from London to India, drugged, strangled, and her body dumped in the Ravi River, never to be seen again. After the killing, risking her own life, Sarbjit fought secretly for justice for nine long, scared years. Eventually, with immense bravery, she became the first person within a murderer’s family ever to go into open court in an honour killing trial as the Prosecution’s key witness, and the first to waive her anonymity in such a trial. As a result of her testimony, the trial led to the first successful prosecution of an honour killing without the body ever being found. But her story doesn’t end there. Since the trial, her life has been threatened; her own husband arrested after an allegation of intimidation. Shamed is a story of fear and of horror – but also of immense courage, and a woman who risked everything to see that justice was done.