The New York Times reports on “soul-searching” in Turkey after the murder of a gay man last year:
For Ahmet Yildiz, a stocky and affable 26-year-old, the choice to live openly as a gay man proved deadly. Prosecutors say his own father hunted him down, traveling more than 600 miles from his hometown to shoot his son in an old neighborhood of Istanbul.
Mr. Yildiz was killed 16 months ago, the victim of what sociologists say is the first gay honor killing in Turkey to surface publicly. He was shot five times as he left his apartment to buy ice cream. A witness said dozens of neighbors watched the killing from their windows, but refused to come forward. His body remained unclaimed by his family, a grievous fate under Muslim custom.
A sociologist comments on this “honor killing”:
Until recently, so-called honor killings have been largely confined to women, who face being killed by male relatives for perceived grievances ranging from consensual sex outside of marriage to stealing a glance at a boy. A recent government survey estimated that one person dies every week in Istanbul as a result of honor killings, while the United Nations estimates the practice globally claims as many as 5,000 lives a year. In Turkey, relatives convicted in such killings are subject to life sentences.
A sociologist who studies honor killings, Mazhar Bagli, at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, noted that tribal Kurdish families that kill daughters perceived to have dishonored them publicize the murders to help cleanse their shame.
But he said gay honor killings remained underground because a homosexual not only brought shame to his family, but also tainted the concept of male identity upon which the community’s social structure depended.
“Until now, gay honor killings have been invisible because homosexuality is taboo,” he said.
Gay rights groups argue that there is an increasingly open homophobia in Turkey.
Comments 3
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist — December 1, 2009
for god's sake, there is NO such thing as honor killings. Murder is murder, period. Whenever a Muslim, Arab, Persian, Turkish, Middle Eastern, or South Asian commits a killing in the family, the media is quick to label it a "honor killing." yet when a WHITE man kills his wife or child, it's simply called a MURDER!!!
I've read and heard stories about white people killing or threatening their own family members or children because of their sexuality or they bring a bad name to the family because of what they've done. So why is this any different? It's not.
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Andrew — December 3, 2009
DIMA - The euphemism we use to describe a murder actually tells us quite a lot about the social context of its occurence, as well as the degree of acceptability it might have in the mind of the perpretrator.
When a white person in uniform kills any number of people in a military action, our politics determine whether we perceive it as murder. When a convict is killed by an officer of the state according to his/her sentence, our values determine whether we call it murder or capital punishment. Other cultural values deem the killing of fetuses or livestock to be murder, but it's impossible to deploy the term in those contexts without a clear agenda.
While I agree that so-called honor killings are certainly equivalent to murder and must be prosecuted as such, it seems that we must understand the unique aspects of their sociological framework if we intend to prevent them. Unlike random homicides, several countries do still have laws shielding honor-killing perps from justice, and in plenty more the existing laws are far less likely to be enforced than in relatively secular Turkey. Combined with the tacit approval that families who kill their own might receive from their communities, I think the scenario is special enough to be identified - though not excused - by a term more specific than "murder."
However, I don't think that the religious or ethnic criteria alone are enough to distinguish an honor killing. Rather than hastily pinning on the term whenever the crime involves Muslim, we should examine the degree to which such actions transgress the norms and values of the community and laws of the countries in which they occur. If we can identify communities with a clear pattern toward this particular mentality, we'd be far better equipped to protect potential victims than we are by stapling bits of data onto ethnic stereotypes.