Etymology

Catherine Price has a rather depressing entry up about women being murdered because they married for love.  The details are particularly horrific, but worse yet the perpetrators probably won't even be pursued.

The girls died over one and a half months ago and no one has been arrested; when the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization, tried to register a criminal complaint about the case, the local police refused. Worse, several male legislators from Baluchistan (the province where the killings occurred) defended the killings in Pakistan's national parliament. "These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them," said one senator from Baluchistan, Israrullah Zehri. "Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."

One might argue that shooting someone and burying her alive are the definition of an "immoral act," but hey -- why let rationality get in the way of a centuries-old tradition? After all, as Samar Minallah, a human rights activist who investigated the killings, stated to the Globe and Mail, "Never in Pakistan's history have we seen the perpetrators of such crimes punished."

One thought on the matter.  Would we do better describing these murders as lynchings rather than honor killings?  Based on the wikipedia description, it sounds like the key aspect of lynching is that two or more people are involved.  I don't know whether these killings normally have multiple perpetrators, but that protection by the community seems to get at the essence of what constitutes a lynching.  I've never been big on the whole "honor" concept, but it's still a positive word, and I don't think it's one that should be associated with such a dreadful practice.

The utility of thinking of them as lynching is that at least in America we've found techniques to deal with these practices.  (One could argue that some police brutality still qualifies as a lynching, but the order of magnitude is far lower than number of incidents decades ago.)  That may help us have the proper frame of mind when working with reformers in other countries to help them find solutions.

I don't always approve of trying to give things nastier names.  I think calling "suicide bombers" "murder bombers" is just redundant.  We certainly shouldn't call them martyrs, but suicide is the key descriptive term.  It isn't as if suicide has any positive moral connotations in English.