Unregulated sexual activity threatens not only the individuals involved but also the religious values of the society or state in which excess occurs. Child sexual abuse occurred on a wide scale in the Catholic Church and the fear of this being discovered or resulting in a loss of support led to consistent cover-ups; offending priests were sent to special retreat houses, detox centres for alcoholism or given early retirement. These actions point to an institutionalized violence based on ‘secrecy, impunity and almost totalitarian authority of Bishops and Cardinals’ (Scheper-Hughes and Devine 2003: 16). In other cultures, rather than simply being seen as offending against a moral code, the violation of sex regulations may be punishable by death where the entire social fabric is considered to have been contaminated. These sexual acts are sufficiently transgressive to warrant the ‘crime of honour’ – the death penalty – because national agendas and religious identities are intimately entwined with female sexuality. The purpose of killing as part of a code of honour is to manage the public face of family sexuality represented by female genitals, since acts of murder are more justifiable than acts of sexual immorality.
In his coverage of the literature on homicide and suicide, Gideon Kressel (1981: 152) argues that institutionalized homicide in Arab Muslim countries is a con sequence of hierarchical power structures amongst patrilineal kin groups and is not ‘altruistic’, ‘egoistic’ or ‘anomic’. Murder is a group act that results from prior plan ning rather than instantaneous rage or uncontrolled outbursts. In this sense, the crime of honour is not
equivalent to the Western ‘crime of passion’, which is defined by an individual’s temp- orary insanity prompted by intense jealousy or heartbreak rather than premeditation. Instead, close scrutiny of a daughter’s honour extends to continuous supervision in which young girls always have a watchful eye upon them that keeps them behind closed doors and means they are given away in marriage as soon as possible. Marriage, however, does not absolve the girl of her responsibility for protecting the family name. The response to adultery by married women is extremely harsh, with stoning as punishment, while the single woman may be whipped 100 times publicly (Kressel 1981: 142). In the Qur’an, public lashings are advised for a male adulterer, along with the prescription that they should only marry an adulteress (Kressel 1981: 142).
British rule resulted in changes to killings in the honour code. In the past, in Israeli Arab villages, for example, the immoral woman would be killed publicly and the murderer could advance his honourable status by parading the blood-stained weapon through the streets and covering his clothes in his victim’s blood (Kressel 1981: 143). However, these practices were driven underground once the law inter vened and per- petrators were caught and tried for their acts. While women are seldom involved in the attack on the guilty woman, they may be accomplices in assisting the attacker, either by spreading rumours of the misconduct or by bringing their daughters to the scene of the crime.
In Arab society, men are not merely protecting their reputations, they are idolizing the female hymen as the cocoon and haven within which their own reproductive power, political status and generational self-worth rests. Virginity is not simply an attribute that they wish to possess for demonstrating their masculine prowess; rather, it creates a man and his offspring and ensures their lineage. Women are not just owned, they are con sumed by their husbands and their bodies become part of their husband’s body. Thus, men may kill women if ‘they fail to bleed on their wedding night, or if they dis- honour and shame the family, by, for example, conversing with a man, smoking, coming home late, or engaging in a romantic relationship’ (al-Khayyat 1990, cited in Shalhoub- Kevorkian 2002: 580). It could be argued that, when viewed as an extension of the male body, a husband may feel polluted as a result of his wife’s sexual demeanour and her body becomes an aspect of self-loathing towards himself.
In a number of cases, the need to kill has been excused by the courts but as these offences are considered to be private rather than public, they do not sit easily under legal jurisdiction. Exemption from punishment for ‘crimes of honour’ is part of the Jordanian Penal Code (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2002: 580). However, the partial status of the law is evident in the fact that only male relatives, husbands and male blood relatives can be pardoned for their offences against the woman; should a wife find her husband to be unfaithful, she has no equivalent comeback. A clear disparity between men’s and women’s sexual freedoms persists, also evidenced in the fact that men may have almost unlimited potential to take mistresses, conquests that are seen to enhance sexual status and power. However, the Qur’an is viewed as having improved the lot of women by giving daughters half (as much as sons) in an inheritance, limiting the number of wives
a man may take to four, and equating the law for the adulteress to that for her partner in crime (Kressel 1981: 143).
These examples show us that both nations and families may be equally complicit in the implementation of oppressive sanctions on female reproductive capacities, some with extreme consequences. Yet, even in those countries that seek to shape supposedly healthy attitudes to sex and reproduction, the term ‘family planning’ may conjure up notions of mutual consent, negotiation and long-term vision between parents, while masking the possibility of violence occurring within relationships where rights to planning are not held equally by both husband and wife. In these places, women’s rights to reproductive health and their rights to protect themselves from AIDS are not necessarily recognized due to the social stigma attached to discussing condom use and the subjugated role of women in negotiating safe sex. Often women cannot mention condoms for fear of male violence and the stigma attached, which would imply infidelity on their part, or they (mis)understand ‘safe sex’ and the use of condoms as about preventing pregnancy rather than STDs (García 2009: 612).
In countries where reproduction is a sign of social status, women may feel pres sur- ized into accepting male views about the use of condoms as a challenge to male rights to reproduction. A woman may either accept her partner’s view or, in some cases, subvert his insecurity by using a contraceptive method invisible to him (Heise 1997: 420), but she does so at her peril, for if discovered she may be beaten. This violence potentially opens women to an increased risk of STDs ‘either through non-consensual sex or by limiting her willingness and/or ability to enforce condom use’ (Heise 1997: 420). Where silence is maintained around family-planning issues in order to uphold cultural norms, it may promote a distorted view of what husbands actually think; although these women fear male abuse, this may not be a reality. Indeed, some studies have shown that men in these countries are actually open to family-planning issues (Gallen et al. 1986). In these contested spaces of reproductive possibility, male authority and roles as husband, father and head of the family are (re-)created and challenged by social expectation.