Media Talk: Murder for honour’s sake

Over 5,000 girls and women are killed each year by male relatives in the belief that it will purge a family of shame brought on it by the behaviour of a sister, daughter, wife or mother.
Award-winning Rana Husseini began investigating so-called honour killings in 1994 after reporting the story of a murder for her newspaper The Jordan Times.
Shocked by the fact that the girl’s “crime” was being raped by her brother, Rana Husseini discovered that 25 girls or women are murdered each year in her home country for “crimes” that range from rape to chewing gum or laughing in the street.
In her book Murder in the Name of Honour, Rana Husseini examines the cases of women in traditional societies and migrant communities in Europe and the United States whose murders were deemed necessary to restore the honour of a family.
Awarded a Reebok Award for Human Rights in 1998, Rana Husseini has, through persistent campaigning, brought this otherwise ignored subject into the public arena. This is an opportunity to hear Rana Husseini discuss a subject which she has fought to uncover.

She will be joined by: Ramita Navaï, a reporter for Channel 4’s Unreported World, who travelled to Turkey where honour killings have now reached record levels with more than 200 girls and women killed in the past year alone; Lynne Townley, crown advocate and senior legal advisor at the Crown Prosecution Service; Liesl Gerntholtz, director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch.