Thursday, January 26, 2012

Preventing honour killings

CBC continues its coverage of these types of crimes. This feature discusses how a Muslim community centre acts to prevent such violence. It's not a large organization, its website showing that it only has about six employees, and yet, I would not be surprised if it was quite succesful. The difference between this community group and a public agency is that precisely because it's a group developed from the community, of the community, it has a different understanding, different cultural capital and legitimacy for the community. In contrast, a public agency has the problem of its exercise of power. By virtue of being a public authority, it has a barrier to building trust within the community, and I believe that trust is key in the prevention of these crimes. That includes not only helping the people who would become victims, but also, effectively, reaching out to those who might become potential perpetrators and influencing them so that they don't.

I also found it interesting that the group is cooperating with an American group that seems completely unrelated - because how would, at face, honour killings have to do with gang violence among African American communities, be related. Well, judging from what is said in the feature, it is linked through the destructive status mechanisms that drives violence in both cases. Also, they both have in common that they are solutions that come from within the community. That gives the group itself power over the issue and a voice in public space.

I think that is imperative if such efforts are to succeed.

2 comments:

  1. I think you're partially right. That is, I agree that community-based efforts are the best hope, and certainly if the community values that supposedly endorse or at least encourage honour killings are reformed from within the community itself, that'll be a lot more successful at preventing them.

    However, realistically, I don't actually think that it's completely a cultural thing, that those who commit these honour killings (or gang violence, for that matter) are necessarily trying to conform to a cultural ideal. Rather, violence is used coercively, to IMPOSE one's values on others more than to satisfy others' expectations. There are thugs in all cultures who try to get their way through intimidation, and we'll always have that, I'm afraid. So long as there are cultural values that can be drawn upon to support moral outrage, there will be outraged people feeling entitled to kill.

    That said, FEWER such killings is definitely an attainable goal, and worthy of pursuit. Community-specific approaches should probably be supplemented with a greater nationwide effort to promote understanding of the Rule of Law and the values which are elementary to living in a liberal democracy. I think we're all desperately in need of that.

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    1. Sorry for not commenting on this. I'm going to say that I was busy teaching (although that is a pretty weak excuse) and that comments on this blog has been rather rare. I address the complexities of "culture" as a factor in a previous post, and I essentially agree - "culture" is a much too simplistic model of explanation.

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