No Honor In Killing

Recently a 37-year-old Muslim woman, Aasiya Hassan, was beheaded by her husband in Buffalo, New York. Immediately after the killing people in the community began to spread spurious rumors about the tragedy being an “honor killing” simply because the killer was Muslim. (Fox News featured this report, compared to the real story, posted on every other news source, such as the one here from the New York Times, and this one in About.com).

Thankfully my friend and fellow journalist Mona Eltahawy wrote about this subject. She said, much more eloquently, what I wanted to say but couldn't (I'm too angry to do so). In an article, entitled, “The Sister We Missed,” Eltahawy says the following:

The right wing, determined to see a woman beater in every Muslim man, seemed to celebrate the gruesome crime as the latest example of “honor killing,” something “they” do to “their” women.

They forget that the singer Rihanna canceled her concert in Malaysia … after she reportedly complained to police that fellow singer and boyfriend, Chris Brown, had beaten her up. They forget that Scott Peterson murdered his pregnant wife.

Exactly.

Domestic abuse is deplorable in any community, yet sadly, it takes place in every country, every city, every town. And guess what? Even women do it to men! There is no culture free from violence yet we as Americans love to pigeonhole cultures and religions and look down our noses whenever people from those groups make headlines. Consider the following statistics completed by the American Bar Association:

Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States.

Intimate partner violence made up 20 percent of all nonfatal violent crime experienced by women in 2001.

Access to firearms yields a more than five-fold increase in risk of intimate partner homicide when considering other factors of abuse, according to a recent study, suggesting that abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners.

Of females killed with a firearm, almost two-thirds were killed by their intimate partners. The number of females shot and killed by their husband or intimate partner was more than three times higher than the total number murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined in single victim/single offender incidents in 2002.

I figured since I was trying to break stereotypes I should research statistics in New Jersey, which was, until 2007, the wealthiest state in the United States (now Maryland is wealthiest and New Jersey comes in second). Contrary to what many Americans think, the highest incidents of domestic abuse were not in the poorest neighborhoods but, rather, in some of the wealthiest. And, contrary again, the ethnic makeup was surprising as well. In Gloucester county located in western New Jersey, domestic abuse calls soared above the rest of the state (it had a registered 13,000 calls regarding domestic abuse as opposed to the lowest county, which had 2,000). Here are the percentages of townspeople, by race:

The population is 87.07 percent White, 9.06 percent Black or African American, 0.19 percent Native American, 1.49 percent Asian, 0.03 percent Pacific Islander, 0.85 from other races, and 1.30 percenet from two or more races. 2.58 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino of any race. 23.8 percent are of Italian, 19.3 percent Irish, 15.8 percent German and 7.6 percent English ancestry according to Census 2000.

My point isn’t to point fingers at white men, black men, rich men or poor men. My point is to say we need to stop the name calling and, instead, stand by the women who endure such awful torture. If her husband is African-American or Pakistani, does her abuse change? If she is white, are her bruises less painful? We cannot put these crimes neatly into boxes and label them cultural problems. We need to call the crime what it is: violence.