Constructing Honour: Making Sense of Honour Crime

Abstract

This paper is a comparative analysis of English language media reports of honour-based violence (HBV) in Pakistan, India, and Canada.

Key findings include:

- male victims of HBV were present in both Pakistani (40%) and Indian (32%) media reports, but notably absent from Canadian reports; and

- perpetrators in both Pakistani (100%) and and Indian (82%) reports matched the majority religious affiliation of the country, but not in Canadian reports.

I conclude that the data gathering and reporting methods in Canada systematically exclude both male victims and perpetrators with majority religious affiliations.

Keywords: honour-based violence, honour-killing, religious violence, gender-based violence