Women Also Kill For Honor: Phyllis Chesler Study
17th April 2016
There was a time when most people believed that honor killings – if they had even heard of them – took place far away, in places like Afghanistan and Algeria and Iran.
These days, we know otherwise. They happen here in the West as well: in Texas, in Toronto, in Paris and Amsterdam.
Now Phyllis Chesler, the pre-eminent authority on the phenomenon and author of the most comprehensive study on honor killings, has found something else we didn’t know before: that many of these killings (and other honor violence) are perpetrated by women. “Women play a very active role in honor-based femicide,” she writes in her latest report, “both by spreading the gossip underlying such murders and by acting as conspirator accomplices and/or hands-on killers in the honor killing of female relatives.”