Honour Killings

‘Honour’-based abuse and killings in the UK claim an estimated 12 to 15 lives annually. Honour killings (sometimes called shame killings) are the murder of a family member, overwhelmingly a woman or girl, by relatives who believe she has brought dishonour upon the family. Tragically, high-profile tragedies like the murders of Banaz Mahmod and Shafilea Ahmed have highlighted how ‘shame’ is used to justify family murders. The perceived offence is rarely violent or criminal in any ordinary sense: it might be simply refusing an arranged marriage to an older male, to settle debts, seeking a divorce, having a relationship outside marriage, or simply behaving in a way that challenges traditional cultural beliefs and attitudes or gender roles.

Global estimates suggest the practice claims thousands of lives every year. The United Nations Population Fund estimates the annual worldwide figure at up to 5,000 women and girls, though some non-governmental organisations put the number as high as 20,000.

The gap between these estimates is itself revealing as honour killings are chronically underreported, frequently misclassified as suicides, accidents, or ordinary domestic violence, and often shielded by community silence.

Beyond ‘Culture’, is a structural reading

A conventional account of honour killings tends to stop at culture and religion, treating the practice as an unfortunate tradition confined to particular regions or belief systems. Critical criminology pushes further, asking what honour killings reveal about how gender, power, and law intersect, along with the harm that is caused.

Framed this way, honour killings are not a cultural aberration but an extreme expression of patriarchal control that exists, in different forms, across virtually every society. Certain Eastern European countries have recorded cases of honour-based violence within their own indigenous populations, and acts of ‘honour’ killings occurred within living memory in Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece.

Researchers caution against a reductionist approach that pins the practice on one culture or religion, noting this framing often ends up excluding the wider social, political, and economic forces at play, and can slide into stereotyping entire communities as backward.

That said, the data does show clear regional concentration. Honour killings have been reported across roughly thirty countries globally, spanning very different histories, cultures, and religions. What unites these cases is less a specific belief system than a shared social structure, meaning family and community standing tied to female sexual behaviour, with violence positioned as the mechanism for restoring that standing when it’s perceived to be threatened.

Whose Honour, Whose Law?

Critical criminology’s central question (is who defines crime, and in whose interest?) is unusually visible in honour killing cases. In many jurisdictions, the law has historically treated these killings with leniency precisely because they were framed as defending honour rather than as ordinary murder.

The consequences of that leniency are stark. In Afghanistan, of 280 recorded honour-killing and related murder cases between January 2016 and December 2017, only 50 ended in a conviction, leading UN investigators to conclude that the vast majority of these offences could be committed with impunity. Similar patterns of near-total impunity appear across multiple jurisdictions where honour is recognised, formally or informally, as a mitigating factor.

Even where perpetrators are family members rather than the state, critical criminologists argue the state remains implicated, through laws that historically excused or reduced sentences for ‘honour’ motives, through police and courts reluctant to intervene in what’s framed as a private family matter, and through the failure to build protective infrastructure for women at risk. This is why international bodies have pushed for structural reform rather than case-by-case prosecution. The UN General Assembly’s 2005 resolution on eliminating crimes against women committed in the name of honour urged member states to ensure accountability, strengthen institutional reporting mechanisms, and improve data collection, while CEDAW’s General Recommendation 19 called on states to remove the ‘honour’ defence from assault and murder prosecutions entirely.

Recent Legal Developments

Legal recognition of honour-based violence as a distinct category continues to evolve. In the UK, the Crime and Policing Act 2026 introduced legislation in February 2026 explicitly defining honour-based violence, forming part of a broader government commitment to halve violence against women and girls and improve how public services respond to these cases. This kind of explicit legal definition matters because without it, honour killings are easily absorbed into general domestic violence or homicide statistics, obscuring the specific dynamics (multiple family members as co-conspirators, premeditation, community complicity) that distinguish them and that protective services need to recognise.

Elsewhere, progress is far more uneven. A 2025 study in the American Sociological Review, using data from Turkey, found that honour killings were most common in precisely the settings where honour norms are actively contested, suggesting that periods of social change, where traditional gender expectations are being challenged, may actually heighten risk rather than reduce it. This complicates any assumption that modernisation or economic development will straightforwardly reduce the practice.

Who Is Most at Risk

The evidence consistently points to a specific demographic and risk profile. A study in Jordan found that 96% of women murdered in these cases were killed by a family member, and research on Kurdish communities in the UK found women aged 14 to 30 were primarily the victims of honour-related homicides. Perpetrators are typically male relatives (fathers, brothers, husbands, or uncles) and in a substantial share of documented cases, children are also killed alongside the primary target, usually a mother or daughter.

Attitudes that sustain the practice are not fixed. Research among ninth-grade students in Amman found that boys were more likely than girls to support attitudes favourable to honour killing, but that support dropped in households with higher education levels and where the mother was employed. This is a genuinely useful finding for prevention work as it suggests that women’s economic participation and broader access to education can shift the underlying attitudes, not just the enforcement response.

Toward Prevention, Not Just Punishment

A purely punitive response (harsher sentences, more prosecutions) is necessary but insufficient. Critical criminology’s core argument is that honour killings are sustained by social structures, not just individual choices, which means prevention has to work at that same structural level as legal reform that removes ‘honour’ as a mitigating factor, resourced and confidential reporting mechanisms so victims and at-risk women aren’t forced to rely on community networks that may be complicit, safe housing and long-term protection for those who do come forward, and education programmes that engage boys and men directly rather than treating this as solely a ‘women’s or girls issue.’

None of this is simple. Removing legal leniency can push these killings further underground rather than eliminating them. Protective shelters are only useful if women know they exist and can safely reach them.

Israeli authorities, for instance, have been criticised for having safe houses available for at-risk women and girls without police, social work, and court authorities consistently making use of them.

Real progress requires sustained coordination between law, social services, education, and community-level advocacy, not a single policy lever.

To end

Honour killings sit at the uncomfortable intersection of culture, patriarchy, and state power that critical criminology exists to examine.

Treating them purely as a cultural artefact of ‘elsewhere’ let’s legal systems everywhere off the hook for the ways law has historically enabled, excused, or simply failed to see this violence.

The more useful question isn’t which culture produces honour killings, but which structures (legal, economic, social) allow them to continue, and what it would take to dismantle each one.