WUNRN
Global Fund for Women
By Zeina Zataari - October 06, 2010
As an
activist-scholar, I have always been interested in the intersections between
the two apparently separate worlds and have worked to ensure knowledge produced
serves societal change towards equality and justice. I was thrilled to see this
intersection in action at the World Congress for Middle Eastern
Studies in
One remarkable
panel, Women of
Although notions
of honor may shift and change, Leyla reminded us that women are the ones who
invariably pay the price to ‘uphold’ honor. ‘Honor-killings,’ like most cases
of violence against women, does not happen in a vacuum, but within a long
historical and political context. She attributed the rise in ‘honor killings’
in
In 2004, after a
long campaign led by Turkish feminist organizations, including our grantee
partner Women for Women’s Human Rights,
the penal code no longer allowed reduced sentences for crimes of ‘honor,’
although it still does for crimes of ‘custom.’ Their challenge now is changing
attitudes and practice. Rates of suicide
by young women are growing in rural Turkey
and Egypt
where young women are shamed and then encouraged by family members to commit
suicide as a way to ‘cleanse’ the family ‘honor,’ and also enable families to
get away with their crime.
Feminist
research reveals how such crimes are portrayed in the media as ‘custom’ when
the perpetrator is Kurdish, whereas when committed by a Turkish individual, it
is usually buried in the papers and described as either passion crimes or
random acts of violence. This contributes to inflicting further violence on
women by attributing a global phenomenon like violence to a ‘cultural’ problem
that further marginalizes Kurdish women.
Yet perpetrators
continue to live with immunity,
which has led the European Court of Human Rights in June 2009 to fine and
convict
Listening to the
ways in which feminist academics and activists are working together in