When women are seen as the carriers of a family’s honor they become vulnerable to attacks involving physical violence, mutilation and even murder, usually at the hand of an “offended” male kin and often with the tacit or explicit assent of female relatives.

—Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Opinion Piece for International Women’s Day: Honor Killing and Domestic Violence,”

March 2010

An honor killing is the murder of a family member due to the belief that the victim has brought dishonor upon the family or community.

The United Nations Population Fund estimates that perhaps as many as five thousand women and girls a year are killed by members of their own families. Many women’s groups in the Middle East and Southwest Asia suspect the number of victims is about four times greater.

The perceived dishonor can be the result of dressing in a manner unacceptable to the family or community, wanting to terminate or prevent an arranged marriage, engaging in heterosexual acts outside marriage, or engaging in homosexual acts, amongst other things.

The most famous honor killing case in Denmark was that of Ghazala Khan, a nineteen-year-old woman who was shot and killed outside a train station in Slagelse, west of Copenhagen, in 2005 because her family disapproved of her choice of a husband. Nine people, including her father, brother, three uncles, an aunt, and two family friends were convicted of murder or accessory to murder in this case.