6.4.7 Arranged Marriage and Honour Crime

Arranged Marriage Revisited

Arranged marriage is common among Muslims because of the conscious restrictions on mixing between the sexes.  Furthermore, close-knit and insular communities and extended-family structures also create the conditions in which arranged marriage becomes an acceptable norm.  The stability of these communities  also depends on arranged marriages because the marriage is not simply between the two individuals but sets up obligations between layers of in-laws.  If a partner or a partner’s family doesn’t fulfil the expectations of the other side, whole extended family structures unravel.  Extended families and traditional communities appear more insular, inward-looking and resistant to newcomers because their members suppose, with some justification, that marriage partners from outside the community are unaware of or unable to take part in all the tangled mutual obligations that their society expects of a marriage partner.

Marriage Outside the Clan

Nowadays there is much greater acceptance within the Muslim community of marriage across ethnic divisions, including with converts to Islam.  From a purely religious perspective there is no question – from the outset Islam has been emphatically opposed to ethnic and racial distinction, even with explicit recommendations to marry away from ones own clan in preference to within it, and converts have always been held in high esteem.  However in communities with traditional extended families, the mutual obligations described above are real obstacles and awareness of them still creates strong resistance to marriage to people outside the ethnic community or family clan.

Honour Crime

Most instances of violent crime that are nominally associated with family honour have their roots not, as is commonly supposed, in traditional pressures to maintain a certain status of the family, but in domestic power struggles, usually between father and daughter.  In this respect they are the extended-family equivalent of ‘tug of love’ crimes of Western society, where young children are often the victims of one of their (usually estranged) parents.  In Western families the tension that leads to murder in the family is usually between the spouses/partners, and involves issues of control of young children (usually in terms of parental access).  The similarities are important – to assume that a father murders his daughter in order to save ‘family honour’ according to some mysterious oriental conviction, is to misunderstand the crime and potentially therefore to misapply justice as well as possibly misunderstand the criminology and possibly the evidence too.  In extended, insular families such as in those Muslim families which have strong first-generation clan traditions (not only Muslims of course), the tension shifts to the generations, and the most vulnerable fracture is between father and daughter.  The issue is the same, control over family members, but the break is initiated by the adolescent or adult child, rather than by one partner as in the western equivalent.  The issue of control typically concerns the father’s loss of control over the daughter.  This may be manifested by the child using cultural, ethnic or religious shifts as a tool, e.g. conversion to another religion, or more commonly, sexual relationship outside the ethnic group.  Such ‘tools’ however are secondary to the issue of loss of control, because invariably where religion is the driving issue the family is not staunchly religious, or where sexual relations are the driving issue, if the same sexual mores were applied inside the ethnic group the matter would be resolved easily, or brushed over if it were a son rather than daughter in the relationship.

On the other hand the kind of ‘honour crime’ that really is tied to a perverted sense of honour, is typified by its apparent lack of emotion rather than by an extreme emotional response.  Members of the family or more significantly, the community, perceive a callously “surgical” need to remove a wayward child in order to maintain the status quo.  That degree of callousness and implicated community is much rarer among families that have been uprooted by immigration, because the traditional community bonds are much weaker and the emotional bonds within the family are much stronger (though of course the very intensity of emotional bond may drive people towards instability).

In short, what is popularly described as ‘honour crime’ in Britain usually has little to do with honour and status in the clan and a lot to do with parental insecurity and control over their children, the same factors as motivate family murders in Western society.