Heshu Yones was 16 and in love. For this her father slit her throat and killed her. Heshu’s ‘crime’ was that she fell in love with a fellow student at her college. The young man belonged to a different religion and the two planned to marry – against her father’s wishes. ‘Me and you will probably never understand each other,’ Heshu wrote to her father as she prepared to run away. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted, but there are some things you can’t change.’

Samia Sarwar was 29 years old, a mother of two and a student of law. She’d been married several years to a cousin, her mother’s sister’s son – and had suffered continuing violence and abuse. She decided to get a divorce. As it happened, her lawyer, Hina Jilani, ran a shelter for women where Samia was housed while she waited for the divorce. Soon Samia’s mother sought permission to see her. She was accompanied by a man whom Samia didn’t recognize. He was there ostensibly to help her frail mother walk. Once in the lawyer’s office the man pulled out a gun and shot Samia dead. A second bullet, intended for the lawyer, missed. Samia’s mother is a doctor and her father is the chair of his local Chamber of Commerce and a successful entrepreneur. No action has been taken against them. In their community they’re seen as heroes.

There is a name for this terrible violence. It’s called ‘honour’ killing. In this perverted notion of honour women who are seen to be stepping out of line are murdered so that male ‘honour’ can be preserved and protected or restored. It’s a ‘tradition’ as old as the hills and it’s held sway everywhere – in ancient civilizations, in agrarian societies in China and India or in tribal ones in the Middle East, in southern Europe and in Latin America. Until recently Anglo-Saxon and Gallic societies also saw women as chattels and held that adultery was a crime against property and against honour.

Much of this has changed today. But despite the ineluctable force of modernization it’s surprising how strongly and deeply rooted this callous disregard for women is.

How, I ask myself, can individuals, families and communities justify the murder of thousands of young woman because of fear? The fear is that women are people, not objects and may have human desires, needs and rights of their own.

Heshu Yones’s father is an Iraqi Kurd and the young woman was murdered in London. That will no doubt feed into the already considerable paranoia about Islam – and Iraq in particular. It will enable many in Britain, where the murder took place, to dismiss the event as something that only happens to others. But such violence is not just ‘out there’. It can’t be that easily dismissed. Violence against women takes its own cultural form in each society and all of it has to do with the threat women’s autonomy poses to male power.

In Pakistan, where Samia Sarwar was shot, women’s groups are fighting against ‘honour’ killings. They are demanding that murderers be treated according to the laws of the land and not be allowed to find shelter behind the curtain of ‘culture’. They’re exposing the hidden stories that lie behind such killings: stories about property, money and unpaid loans. Brutalizing women becomes a way for men to deal with each other in extra-legal ways. Destroy the other’s ‘property’ and you teach him a lesson he will not easily forget.

It is curious how culture, something to be celebrated and embraced, twists into something to be feared.

But what is this culture that people are so anxious to protect? It’s a culture of violence, a culture based on the oppression of women and a culture that feeds into the increasing acceptance of other forms of violence which are not necessarily gender-based.

Perhaps it’s time we learned something from those brave women’s groups who are fighting against such cultural impositions. They are the only ones who are speaking out for the victims of such violence, who are attempting to return humanity to the women who have been killed. They’re the ones who are setting up homes and shelters, persuading governments to make fairer laws. But in the end it will take much more than the efforts of a few women’s groups to persuade the world that there is no honour, only shame, in killing.

Urvashi Butalia is an Indian writer and publisher.
She lives in New Delhi.