Mona Ali Allam
On a hot summer afternoon (summer
2021), the expected news arrived in the village* located in Naga Hammadi, Qena
Governorate, southern Egypt: the body of a drowned woman was found in the Nile
River in the village, or “Bahr” (the sea) in the local expression. The news was not
surprising, as the fate is known to everyone here in such cases. The woman, who people kept
talking about throughout the period before her death, was twenty years old, and
her brother had killed her "because he suspected her behavior," as
reported in the published news about the incident. He was arrested, and he was soon released after weeks[1],
to return to the village and resume his usual social activities, which he had
hidden from, and everyone received him with acceptance and appreciation as a
"man", who washed away his shame and restored his “honor”, and his
head turned from low to high.
Around the same time in the
previous year (2020), the same village was on a date with a similar crime, this
time the victim was from the other tribe, as the villagers are basically
divided into two tribes, the Arabs and the Hawara: the body of a twenty-three-year-old
young woman was found and she was reported missing two days
ago, she was wrapped in a blanket and lying on the Nile shore in the village,
and her brother was also behind the crime.
Oral history
When we trace the history of such
crimes in this village alone, we can hear many similar stories especially from
the mouths of old women. Among them is a well-known story that took place about
fifty years ago, in which three women were killed: a woman, her teenage
daughter, and her sister. They had gone with a brother of theirs to a nearby
village, and the brother used to sing at weddings with the participation of his
companions playing the drum and flute. The news spread in their village: “They
said they danced, drunk cigarettes and talk to men,” says the seventy-year-old
woman. That was enough for the men of the family to decide to get rid of the
three women. In some cases, the corpse did not
appear, as it was weighed down with stones, so it sank to the depth of the
river and disappeared..
Why the Nile?
Villagers' answers varied between being a means of concealment
or announcing to people. An employee in his forties says that the goal is for
the body not to appear, or for it to appear in a remote place without its
identity being identified, or for the crime to be considered normal drowning. While a young man in his twenties from the same
village says that there are different ways to get rid of the woman in these
cases, but "the Nile
is the most common way, so that when
the body is found, the news will spread among people... they
heard about the scandal, so they must hear that she died".
The young
man added that she had already been killed before dumping her, and that the
place for dumping the body was chosen from the fields overlooking the Nile, not
the houses, "The fields
stretch across larger areas than houses at the Nile here.. it will be hidden", and that this must be done at night. He said
that the murderer is known to them and he is proud of what he did before the people of his village, but in front of police or
public prosecution he denies to avoid criminal punishment. While others
mentioned that killing these women is also by dumping them into the Nile.
at a more general level
we can
trace many news about the murders of women in other villages, centers and
governorates, a large percentage of which are in Upper Egypt:
The body
of an unidentified woman was found floating in the Nile River, in full clothes,
behind the Assiut court. She had been absent from her home for twenty days, and there
was no report about her absence or
disappearance. It turned out that she was thirty years old, and that her three
brothers were behind her killing because they suspected her behavior, by poisoning her and then throwing her body from the top of the Wasti Bridge in Assiut, according to what
they said after they were caught (Al-Bawaba News, October 2021).
The body
of a girl in the second decade of her life was found on the bank of the Nile in
Al-Maabda Island in Manfalut / Assiut, shotted with cartridge. The police
concluded that the victim's father, uncle and cousin were behind the crime
because of her misbehavior, according to their statements after they were
caught, as they took her by force at gunpoint to this place, and shotted her, which caused an injury that killed her, and they
threw her into the Nile "in revenge for their honor" (Al-Ahram March
2016).
The body
of a girl was found lying inside a "sack" (a large burlap bag) in the
Nile River, in Naqada, Qena, near the island of Zawaida, with signs of strangulation
on the neck and unclear features. It turned out that the killer was her cousin,
a 28-year-old farmer, because there were rumors about her, so he decided to get
rid of her to end being stigmatized by people, as he said. He prepared a plan
to lure her to the second floor of her house, strangle her with a scarf, and
then put the body in a large sack. He brought in front of the house the vehicle
used to transport building materials, put the sack in it, and walked for more
than a kilometer in the midst of the fields until he reached the island, and he
had prepared a small boat, put the body inside it, and walked a close distance
to the water, throwing the body and placing a large stone inside the sack so
that it would not float on the surface of the water. However, after a few days,
the people found the body, and it was with unclear features after being mutilated by fishes, and the prosecution decided to detain him pending
investigations (Sout Al-Ummah, December 2017).
Three
brothers, agricultural workers in their twenties, end the life of their
18-year-old sister in the Atsa, Fayoum, because of her suspicious behavior and
her frequent leaving the house while they went to work in the fields. They
attacked her after entering the bathroom of the house, her older brother tied
her feet and hands with ropes and threw water on her head, the twin brothers
put an electric wire between her toes and then connected the electric current,
which resulted in her death from electrocution, while the mother rumored the
death of her daughter while she was using the house washing machine. However, the
examination of the body by the official doctor (affiliated with the Ministry of
Health and this is necessary to write the death report to allow burial)
revealed that there was a criminal suspicion (Al-Masry Al-Youm, August 2022).
In
addition to a lot of news about finding the bodies of women in the Nile, or the
body of a woman who was slaughtered or stabbed inside her house, or who died as
a result of a fire that broke out in it, or that she fell from above..These
cannot be asserted as "honor crimes" unless they include explicit
references, but they remain questionable.
Gender-related killing of women and
girls
"Honor"
crimes fall within a broader range of crimes known as "gender-related killing
of women and girls", and are the most extreme and brutal manifestations of
violence against women, occurring all regions and countries worldwide,
according to the United Nations.
A recent
document (March 2022) prepared by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, titled “Statistical framework for measuring
the gender-related killing of women and girls (also referred to as
“femicide/feminicide”)”[2]
has released In English and it included four criteria for determining this type of
crime: the killing of a woman by another person (objective criterion), the
intention of the perpetrator to kill the victim (subjective criterion), and the
illegality of the killing (legal criterion) - which are the criteria for
premeditated murder, of which these crimes are a subset - and then a fourth
criterion, which is the gender motive for killing.
This
fourth criterion refers to a set of factors that represent root causes
underlying crime and characterize the context in which it occurs, such as the
ideology of male entitlement and privilege over women, the need to assert male
dominance or authority, the prevention, discouragement or punishment of what is
considered unacceptable behavior from a woman that is seen as not in line with
social norms or contrary to stereotypical gender roles.
According
to the document, this type of crime can occur in a wide range of cases in the
public and private spheres, depending on the nature of the relationship between
the perpetrator and the victim, and that the evidence is ample that most of
them have been committed by current or former intimate partners, or other
family members such as parents, brothers and uncles, as in "honor"
crimes and dowry killings[3].
It can also occur in cases where the power relationship between the victim and
the perpetrator is unequal, where the latter is in a position of authority or
care for the victim (her doctor, teacher, police officer, public official or clergy..
who has a direct relationship with her).
Egypt and
Arab countries have witnessed a number of horrific murders against women in the
recent period, and the reactions to them were wide and varied, exposing the
entrenched culture of discrimination among sectors of public opinion against
women, to the point of stigmatizing the victim and sympathizing with the
killer.
Crime statistic
According
to the UN document, gender-related killing of women, unlike other forms of
violence against women, has no unified global or regional statistical approach
to count it, and statistics on these crimes are scarce and not comparable at
international level due to the great difference in definitions and legal
applications between countries, which is what the document aimed to face it.
Statistics
of gender-motivated killings of women faces problems at international level,
and in the case of Egypt in particular, there is great difficulty in accessing
crime statistics in general. The Administration of Follow-up and Criminal
Statistics in the Public Security Sector of the Ministry of Interior issues a
huge annual report that includes detailed data on various types of crimes, including murders, attempted murders, and domestic
violence crimes, at the level of each governorate. However, viewing this report, since the end of the 1990s, has
been restricted to security leaders and has been banned from public publication
to the press, researchers and the public[4].
Hence,
answers to questions such as the number of "honor" crimes that occur
each year, their distribution map, or the number of cases where women's bodies
were found in the Nile... become difficult to obtain, which makes public
discussion and analysis of crime without a firm informational basis, and
violates the right of society to know.
Globally,
data published in November 2021 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
indicate that 81,000 women and girls were killed during 2020, about 47,000 of
them (58 percent) died at the hands of an intimate partner or a family member,
which is the equivalent of killing a woman or girl every 11 minutes in the
household or private space, based on data from 95 countries on gender-related
killings of women and girls by intimate partners or family members: the highest
number of victims was in Asia (18,600 victims, nearly 40 percent), but Africa
had the highest rate for the female population (2.7 per 100,000 women), while
Europe recorded the lowest rate (0.7 per 100,000 women)[5].
The reaction of the village community
As soon
as a news about a woman's behavior appeared, it is transmitted on tongues and spreads quickly on a large scale,
especially in a village community where everyone knows each other, there is no
privacy, and relations between families and tribes extend across villages. A
forty-year-old teacher says, "They talk and add... this talks to another,
and another talks to another.. and each one tells a different story”. In every
story I tried to investigate (out of 4 crimes that took place in three villages
over the past years, in which 5 women were murdered, including a woman and her
young daughter[6]), I
heard vastly different details. "You find that people confirmed the
incident as if they had seen it...they only want to believe this thing (the
woman had committed adultery)...any woman enters our house talks about the
story," says a girl in her thirties. Talking can touch the most accurate privacies, and
include the entire family. Not only women who speak, but men can be the first
source of the news.
The
general trend in the village is strongly supportive of the killing of these
women. Rather, it is people's pressure that pushes strongly to carry out the
crime. "Without people talk, no woman would have died," says a young
woman in her twenties. "killing is the easiest thing to do here. Cutting
the neck is the best thing for her father, for her, and for everyone,"
says a woman in her seventies. Another woman in her fifties adds "no reaction
towards “honor” here other than that, especially in the case of married women[7]
.. as a woman, there is nothing less than that is supposed to be done.. don't
write about it.. priority must be for writing about education or health here in
the village.. whatever you write about it, it will not be changed.. even in the
year 3000”.. “as long as she is alive, the story is alive.”.. “once she is
killed, everyone will feel relieved”…
While one of the men of the village asserts
that killing her would save many lives in case of stigmatization between men
and families. Others say that it is necessary to achieve “deterrence” for other
women, otherwise, “this women does and this one does and that one does, it
remains a chaos”. While a university student girl said in a soft voice that
there is certainly another solution, but she does not know it, "Surely
there is a solution in the Qur'an.. but here they kill directly”. Some
expressed their conviction that the killing of sinful women does not contradict
religious legislation[8].
Or that their families have the right to carry out the punishment, “Will the
government has more than him in his sister or his daughter?!” A young man in
his thirties from the circle of friends of one of the accused of killing his
sister said: “I do not care about religion, I care about customs and
traditions.”
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The
impact of the news on young women in particular was more severe, and they
expressed their feelings of terror and shock, and their suffering from
insomnia, crying, and loss of a sense of security.. and some of them talked
about their fathers who put restrictions on them to go out in the aftermath of
these incidents. Girls from the victim's family also feared that this would
affect their chances of getting married.
A woman
from her own tribe said that - before her murder which she supports it- she was
feeling stigmatized whenever she went out on the street. While the young man in
his twenties confirmed that the killing will continue "as long as there
are non-compliant girls”.
A farmer in his forties said that his
society is not tolerant towards a woman's sin, "even if she repents and
our Lord sent down another Qur'an to her from heaven, killing is necessary."
While
many emphasized that it is necessary to make sure and provide evidence before
killing any woman, "there must be conclusive evidence, all people knew, it
must be confirmed, and she is pregnant," and that only if it comes to the sexual
relations, then "the treatment is known," especially if the
man/partner abandoned her and refused to marry her. Others said that there are
victims who are killed just because they behaved unacceptably by their
families.
Against unknown
Siddiq
Abdel-Sater, a lawyer in cassation in Naga Hammadi, says that a percentage of
these crimes are recorded against an unknown person, in cases where the body is
not identified because its features have been lost as a result of the long
period of its stay in the water, and therefore there are no fingerprints or
facial features to be taken. The matter becomes even more difficult if the
water carried the body away for tens of kilometers, especially with the lack or absence of modern
technical capabilities that facilitate police investigations, and the lack of a
DNA database for all citizens. There may not have been a report of her absence at all, and the person may not have data registered with the
government, as in the outskirts of villages and areas where the rate of
illiteracy is high.
He also
points to the disproportionate size of the police presence in these areas
compared to the number of their residents. A center such as Naga Hammadi, with
a population of about half a million people, is served by one police station,
which puts great pressure on police personnel, and therefore crimes and reports
do not receive full attention. In addition to the personal attitude of some of
them, especially if they were from Upper Egypt, “If I were in his place, I
would have done the same”. Even if they were from outside Upper Egypt, they
knew the local culture and its customs.
According
to official figures[9], Qena
governorate includes 9 centers inhabited by more than 3.5 million people and is
divided into 9 cities, 41 main villages, 111 affiliated village, and 1,466
hamlets, and is served by 10 police stations.
The
results of the 2015 survey conducted by the Central Agency for Public
Mobilization and Statistics on Egyptian villages in Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt
(excluding the governorates of North and South Sinai) show that 83.6 percent of
these 4,655 villages do not have a police station.
In an interview with an officer in the village, who
asked not to be named, and who holds a high police rank, he said that the
victims of honor killings are usually women, because they are the ones who
stigmatize their families, and because men can escape outside the village. He
adds that such crimes do not occur only in the governorates of Upper Egypt, but
are also found in the governorates of Lower Egypt, such as Beheira, Kafr
El-Sheikh and Sharkia. The motive behind them is "a human feeling",
as he described it. And unlike other murders, there is sympathy for the
perpetrator. He said that the "government" (the police) tolerates
someone who kills his sister or daughter who commits adultery on the grounds
that this is a man who has been subjected to pressure from the people, and that
these issues do not receive much attention from the police. However, he
confirmed that there is no interference from any party in the police
investigations, and said that the matter is related to the family of the
murdered woman who testified to acquit their son, because she caused them a
scandal and it is certainly that they were the ones who incited him, and this
is in coordination with his lawyer.
Hidden crime against women
"Hidden
crime" is a well-known term in legal literature and criminology. It means
crimes that are not reported to the police and therefore are not recorded in
official documents or investigated. They exist in every society for various
reasons, including: the reluctance of victims or those around them to report
due to the sensitivity of the crime, distrusting the police and wanting to take
revenge themselves, the culture of police officers, including their attitude
towards women, their discretion of the importance of the crime and its
entitlement to be recorded in the documents, as well as the social status or
standing of the perpetrators or victims. This is also linked to the adequate
number and the efficiency of police personnel and the availability of assistive
technologies.
It is obvious
from what people have said - including the police source - that there can be a
lot of "honor" killings of women that are committed without recording.
This source says, “If a girl’s family killed her, they would behave alone, bury
her, obtain a burial permit for her…” It is the responsibility of the “health
inspector,” as he says, as for the police station, as long as there is no
presented report to it, it is not expected to know
about the crime or investigate it.
One of
the residents said that a girl from his neighbors was in her teens and it
happened that she sat with a young man at a wedding or danced with him, she was
photographed and her photo was sent to her brother. So, he and the father
killed her, and it was recorded as a natural death in the death report. He
referred to another case, whose infant was got rid of immediately after its
birth, then she herself was killed a few days later, and no one was held
accountable either, as he said.
A farmer
in his forties from another village says that in case of absence or disappearing of a girl and this was preceded by hearsay about her, the matter is
known to the neighbors and the people of the village in general that her family
has got rid of her. "If a girl is absent, there will be an “honor”
killing, directly", and her family chooses the appropriate method for them
to carry out killing, either individually or in agreement with others, “..if this occurred, for example, with my
neighbor who shares the same wall of the house with me, I can’t ask where she
went” He adds that in some cases, the male partner is also killed without his
family objecting, informing the police station, or even taking revenge.
According
to the general assertion of the residents, everyone conspires to conceal honor
crimes or not reveal the truth in them, starting with the family that does not
mention in its testimony anything that would reveal the crime because it wants
to save its son from criminal punishment, passing through other parties that
could intervene in a way that hinders revealing the truth, as everyone is
working to “kill the story,” In the words of one of them.
Revenge in killing - the woman who was burned with her two daughters
The
incident dates back to more than ten years ago. News had been published on some
websites about the reopening of a main road that had been closed in a village
by dozens of residents protesting the kidnapping of a housewife by unknown
persons, after the police was able to return her, according to the text of the
news. A few days later, another news was published about the charred bodies of
a housewife and her two children being found inside the house in mysterious
circumstances, after she had disappeared for a while, and that an investigation
was underway to whether or not there was a criminal suspicion.
The
victim was a 30-year-old widow who left her family home with her partner[10].
After claiming that she had been kidnapped and so her family blocking the road,
she and her partner were stopped by the police, and the police station worked
to resolve the matter amicably after calling her family[11].
Despite strong suspicions that she was in danger, the woman was handed over to
the men of her family after they pledged not to harm her, and they returned her
to the village, according to a local source from the circle of the woman’s
relatives, while the partner soon fled and no one saw him since then, “If he
died and they knew where he had been buried, they will exhume his grave and
bring him.”
The man
says that the woman's family chose to burn her because they wanted to take
revenge on her after they felt broken among people. "Burning would have
calm their anger, extinguish the fire inside them, erased the shame, and made
people stop talking about them," and that they decided to burn the two
daughters with her so that they would not be stigmatized in the future.
He added
that the decision to burn them was common in the village before its
implementation, "but they wanted someone (from the family) who had the
courage" to carry it out. "She was placed in a room in her family's
house, and he entered the room, poured gasoline on them and set the fire until
the bodies were charred, then the police came".
In the
end, "no one was held accountable”, pointing out that her family is large
and wealthy, albeit with a low level of education, and it has a wide circle of
acquaintances and supporters inside and outside the village, which gives it
weight and power on the ground. However, he confirms that, regardless of the
status of the families, lack of accountability or lack of judicial rulings is
the norm for them in such crimes, which was confirmed by many others.
According
to local sources, the fire was considered unintentional, although there were
marks of restraint on the bodies. Some said that the incident occurred at a
time close to the parliamentary elections, which may have an impact on the way
the woman's family dealt with the matter, given the tribal sensitivities
(between the Arabs and the Hawara) that are most intense on these occasions.
Reasons why women adopt behaviors
condemned by society
Many here
may not be convinced that there are reasons that may push women to these
behaviors, but some, when surveying their opinions, mentioned - through the
cases of victims of honor killings that took place in their village, or in
general, where they see that manifestations of "moral chaos" have
become widespread among them - the low level of education of women (almost all
the victims in the four honor killings that I worked on had a low or
intermediate level of education: a diploma holder, which is an intermediate
qualification whose owner completed secondary school/ did not complete her
education/ did not attend school - according to local sources), lack of
awareness and being a victim of exploitation or extortion, husbands traveling
for long periods and women feeling sexual and emotional deprivation, the
relatively large age difference between the spouses, or the husband’s sexual
weakness, the absence of the role of the family, especially the mother, in
awareness and oversight without repression, the family’s failure to contain her
daughter if she made a mistake before It leads to a bigger mistake, the
negative impact of the drama, the absence of religious motives, poverty, as the
forty-year-old employee, who is active in charitable work, confirmed that poor
girls pay the tax for the high costs of marriage, and then the young man searches for a bride whose family can bear these
costs. He says that the victims are mostly girls became pregnant outside of
marriage, and the killer is the brother.
A woman in her thirties said that
male family members must first support their female relatives financially
before they kill them when they “deviate.”
Among the mentioned reasons also: the effect of the telephone call: "The telephone is the focus of
every need. keeping talking into ears is worse than magic (popular
proverb)" the Internet, which facilitated illegal relationships, “the
(ness) ruined the world” says an eighty years old woman and she means
(net/Internet). There are also comments such as "an eye that does not fill
up" (an indication that she is not satisfied with her husband), "she
was not brought up well", "worthy of pity... bad thinking...it is
written for her on the forehead (pointing to her forehead) that her destiny is
in the river".
Class Dimension
As more
than one case in which the victim was from poor families, the question arose
about the impact of the class or social status of the woman on whether or not
she is killed. Those I spoke with indicated that socially unacceptable
behaviors exist in all classes and all educational levels, but rich families
may resort to other alternatives, as they are keen on their reputation, and
killing a woman will indicate that there is something about her or confirm the
rumors about her, so large families tend to remain silent and deny, marry her
off, or deporting her to another governorate outside Upper Egypt at some of her
relatives, for example, and people may be less daring to talk about her, unlike
what happens to women from poor families who are mostly illiterate and ignorant
and deliberately preserving their social survival by killing.
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Discrimination in law
The lawer
Seddik Abdel Sater says that if a woman’s body is found, whether in the Nile or
anywhere else, and there are suspicions or circumstances suggesting that it is
an “honor” crime, she is subjected, in addition to the usual normal examination
of the corpse, to a vaginal examination to see if it is a virgin or not, or she
recently had a sexual relationship, and this would affect the perpetrator’s
punishment later on. The law in crimes of killing women in the name of “honour”
gives a relative advantage to the woman’s male relatives, headed by the
husband, followed by the father and brother.. this is by allowing the
punishment to be lowered by one or two degrees. In addition to the influence of
the masculine/Upper Egyptian culture of the investigation and judgement
authorities.
Abdel
Sater believes that the differentiation of the law in the crime of adultery
between the man/husband and the woman/wife reflects the society’s collective
mind’s concept of honor, where honor is linked to the woman and she must
preserve it, and the man - not the woman - is authorized to avenge it, so if
the husband caught his wife in the act of adultery in the residence of marriage
(or outside it) and killed her and her partner, his punishment is reduced and
may be limited, for example, to one year imprisonment with a suspended sentence
(Article 237 of the Egyptian Penal Code), but in the opposite situation, the
woman’s punishment may reach death, as the penalty of intentional murder is
applied on her.
“Whoever surprises his wife in the act of adultery and kills her on the
spot along with the person he commits adultery with, shall be punished with
imprisonment instead of the penalties prescribed in Articles 234 and 236.”
The text of Article 237 of the Egyptian Penal Code
The punishment
for adultery for a married woman in Egyptian law is imprisonment for a period
not exceeding two years, and upon the husband’s relinquishment, the penalty
shall be stopped. While the punishment for the
husband is for a period not exceeding 6 months, provided that his adultery took
place in the marital home.
Some
consider these articles unconstitutional due to the differentiation in
punishment between men and women for the same crime.
According
to what was included in the paper prepared by "Fatima Khafagy" from
the "Women's Legal Aid Association" in Cairo (CEWLA) on "honor
killings in Egypt"[12]
for the expert group meeting organized by the "United Nations Section for
the Advancement of Women" in cooperation with the "United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime” (May 2005 Vienna/Austria) Honor killings are not
explicitly provided for in the Egyptian Penal Code, but Article 17 of this law
is usually used to mitigate punishment for the perpetrators of these crimes:
“It is permissible, in criminal matters, if the conditions of the crime
for which the public action is instituted required the clemency of the judges,
to change the punishment in the following way:
Death penalty to life imprisonment or
aggravated imprisonment.
Life imprisonment to aggravated imprisonment or imprisonment.
Aggravated imprisonment to imprisonment,
which may not be less than six months.
imprisonment to imprisonment that
may not be less than three months.”
Article 17 of the Egyptian Penal Code
Judicial rulings
The paper
included an examination of ten cases of "honor" killings that were
considered by the Qena court and issued verdicts. One of them was the case No.
831 of 1998 for a girl who is mentally retarded and suffers from psychological
disorders. Her father and brother killed her after the death of her mother,
because of their deep concern and fear that she would be involved with a
stranger under her frequent leaving the house without permission, as they
said.. the judge used Article 17 of the Penal Code, and ruled the father only
10 years in prison (the paper did not mention the sentence issued against the
brother who was the accomplice to the murder).
Another
case is No. 2331 of 1991 for a girl who was killed by her ex-fiancé after she
broke off her engagement with him and married someone outside the family
without its consent. The perpetrator took his gun, lurked her on the way to her
work, and shot her dead. The court ruling stated that the girl's marriage was
legal, but that it took place without the consent of the family, the tribe, and
the local community in which she lived. Her escape to Cairo is contrary to
rural traditions and causes shame for the family and the tribe, and that the
girl made her family lose respect and reverence. The verdict also stated that
the girl’s brother pardoned the murderer, and Article 17 was also applied, and
the perpetrator was sentenced to seven years in prison.
The other
cases involved women who were killed by their relatives because of "bad
reputation", or for being pregnant outside marriage. Sometimes their
mothers were also killed if they covered up what their daughters had done. In
all cases, Article 17 was applied. With the exception of the two previous
cases, the maximum penalty imposed was 4 years' imprisonment.
However,
other researchers believe that the hypothesis of the Egyptian judiciary's
permanent tolerance towards "honor" cases prevailing in most of the
literature still needs more testing to confirm it, by examining a larger number
of cases[13].
There are
published judicial rulings with severe penalties for such crimes, including the
Naga Hammadi Criminal Court ruling in Qena Governorate to death by hanging on a
worker who killed his sister with several gunshots from an automatic rifle
because he suspected her behavior due to rumors, in an incident dating back to
June 2020 in the village of Abu Hizam (Al-Shorouk website, July 2021),
Another
ruling issued by the Qena Criminal Court to death by hanging on a teacher who
killed his wife while she was sleeping with 14 stab wounds with a cold weapon
after her period was delayed for eight days, so he suspected that she was
pregnant while he was suffering from infertility, an incident dating back to
August 2017 in the Qus center, south of Qena, and investigations indicated that
The victim is of good conduct and behavior (Al-Watan website, September 2019).
Lawyer
Seddik Abdel Sater comments that the verdict may differ from one judge to
another, and that some circumstances may require strictness, such as possession
of an automatic weapon or killing while sleeping.. and he added that it is
likely that the use of the maximum penalty in these cases came after forensic
medicine proved the virginity of the girl, or that the victim had a good
reputation and was not pregnant in the case of a married woman, meaning that
the reasons for mitigation are not available.
Escape of girls
It
happens in villages that girls run away with young men to another center or to
Cairo, who may be from a different tribe and then her marriage to him is
forbidden, or he is not financially ready for marriage in order for the family
to accept him, or the family is willing to marry her off to her cousin, for
example, contrary to girl’s desire. A community woman activist in the
village talked about a nineteen-year-old girl who had contacted her to complain
that her brother was locking her in the house, without explaining the reasons.
Later, this brother contacted her to tell her that his sister had run away with
a young man, and he had brought her back from Abu Tisht (nearby center), and he
had to leave his job in Hurghada to guard her "so
that she would not make a disaster and be killed," and that the girl's
uncles really wanted to kill her.
The
activist adds that she then contacted this girl, blaming her for the stress she
caused to her family, and her response was that if they left her, she would run
away again. The activist comments that in some cases the girl follows her whims
recklessly.
Speaking Victim: I would have been killed had it not been for the
virginity test
The
father's cruelty, his verbal and physical abuse of the mother, the premature
death of the mother, the feeling of emptiness and loneliness with innate
emotional need... These were generally the conditions under which one of the
young women I spoke was living. When she left the village, she was not as she
described herself in complete balance, "as when someone is controlling
me...it is not my brain when I leaved”. She may now consider what she did as
"indiscretion", or that she is a victim of circumstances that push
girls to do so, as she says.
The
absence of a girl would turn the village upside down. Shortly after her arrival
in Cairo, she called her family to help her return to the village. She was in a
state of mental and physical breakdown. But after returning her, she faced much
tougher days.
As soon
as I arrived (the village), they (the men of the family) took me... 3 cars...
they took me to the sea (Nile River) to kill me... I didn't know how to speak...
I didn't leave with anyone... they shot bullets near me in the reed fields...
near the sea (the Nile). The time was three or four o’clock at dawn in the
height of winter.. He kept putting out the cigarettes in my hand (she showed me
the effect of that on her arm).. They tied my hands to throw me into the sea..
I fainted.”
She awoke
from fainting to find herself in her uncle's
house.. “they took my mobile, they didn't find anyone (she had contacted
him)..they beat me with a stick.. they gathered on me, more than a man beat
me..I was telling them I didn't do anything..".
She says
she underwent a virginity test and they found out she was a virgin. "After
examining me, they also wanted to kill me. (They said) I went out and travelled to Cairo," but her uncle was the only one who said
that he wouldn’t be involved in
her murder, “she is a virgin and there are no phone calls."
However,
the punishment that befell her did not end there. She was subjected to harsh
and prolonged family and community punishment.
“They locked me (in the house), I stayed in our house for 3
years, I didn’t leave it, I didn’t see the street, I didn’t buy any new
galabiya.” The women of the family used to stigmatize her, "Oh girl who
eloped with Al-Falahi[14]...
oh girl of phones (means that she talks to men on the phones)...". Her female relatives did
not come to visit her, and her male relatives refused to even greet her. She
was also being beaten. She had to spend her day performing exhausting household
tasks, "from I get up in the morning to I go to sleep, do khata (preparing
cattle dung to be turned into fuel) ... and Waqeed (straw also used to prepare
fuel) ... prepare the food for the house ... wash clothes.."
In the
wider community, she was shunned, rejected, and disdained, and talking about
her story, “Everyone talked about me,” and her strong relationships with her
neighbors and friends since childhood were eroded. She recounts that one of the
female neighbors whom she considered as her mother after her mother's death,
"she said bad things about me" and asked that she not come to visit
them in their house again for fear of her daughters, while all she needed was
consolation in times of distress (and she wiped her hand on her chest).
"Any one came to propose to me was told that: no, this girl
went to Cairo.. any opportunity for marriage was stopped.” Until she recently
got married, which improved her life, despite the difficult economic
conditions, and improved the treatment of others towards her. "People have
come to respect me.. no one used to respect me.. Praise be to Allah, I
have a man, and I go out to buy new
clothes.. I have a separate house.. a door keep dogs away".
Violated rights and necessities for confrontation
In her
study [15]
on "Honor Crimes between Human Rights and Sharia in Egypt," Rasha
El-Shahawy says that the Sharia has defined strict procedures to prove the
crime of adultery, and stipulated the availability of fair trial guarantees,
and that the trial and punishment be in the hands of the competent authority in
the state without allowing individuals at all implement it.
Honor
killings violate fundamental rights in both Sharia and international human
rights law, foremost of which are the right to life, the right not to be
subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,
and the right to gender equality before the law and non-discrimination.
Sharia
criminalized sexual activity outside marriage, and balanced respect for private
life with general morals in society, but - contrary to social norms - it did
not differentiate in punishment between men and women, and made the killing of
a human being the same as killing all of people, and criminalized killing by suspicion, and prohibited espionage, and
severely punished in the crime of "slander”.
The
researcher also says that any codification of
these crimes, even if indirectly by allowing the punishment to be mitigated as
in Egyptian law, contradicts the constitution, Sharia law and international
agreements, which are basic sources of national law. The researcher emphasized the responsibility of the
state in eliminating "honor" crimes by recognizing the problem first
and the need to deal with it urgently, through legal and judicial reforms,
providing protection for potential victims in fulfillment of international
obligations, and spreading community awareness.
…………………………………………………………………………………………
*My work focused on 4 "honor" crimes that took place in three
geographically close villages, all in the Naga Hammadi, Qena Governorate,
southern Egypt. At the request of the villagers, and due to the sensitivity of
the issue, I do not mention the names of the villages, nor do I mention the
names of persons.
[1] I was not able to know his legal status in
the case and the developments of its course. However, as of writing this investigation, that
is, over the course of more than a year, he is at large.
[2]https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/Statistical_framework_femicide_2022.pdf
[3] In India and other countries.
[4] See: Akram Al-Qassas, Crime and Awareness
in the Society of 105 Million, Youm7, June 24, 2022,
Akram
Al-Qassas, Return of the General Security Report.. confronting crime with
publication and information, Youm7, September 9, 2018,
Ahmed Abd
al-Latif, “The Public Security Report.. A Mine of Information Banned from Publishing,” Al-Watan, January 18, 2018,
Maged Osman,
Public Security report, Al-Shorouk newspaper website, February 10, 2013.
[6] The incident dates back to years ago, when
the two women were killed by dumping into the Nile. One of the men of the
family branch with positions was behind the crime, in order to get rid of the shame of the two women accused of deviant behaviors
inside their home- according to local sources. I did not find any published
news of this incident.
[7] She
talks about a case that occurred in her village of a newly married young woman
who was caught with another person, then she was divorced and then killed by
her brother.
[8] These
crimes are not limited to Muslim women. According to an elderly Christian man
from the village, Christian families also get rid of their sinful daughters,
but in different ways, such as poison.
[9] The
official website of Qena Governorate, the official statistics agency, the
Information and Decision Support Center of the Council of Ministers.
[10] A
past and ongoing relationship she has with him was discovered.
[11] by
holding marriage in the police station, according to the source.
[13] See, for example, a master's thesis by
researcher Mohamed Diaa El-Din Zaid from the American University in Cairo,
entitled “The Lenient treatment of honor crimes in
Egypt” (December 2015)
https://fount.aucegypt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1168&context=etds
Article
(17) applies to several crimes, including murder (for other reasons),
possession of drugs or weapons, bribery, and others.
[14] From outside her tribe "Hawwara".
[15] Master's thesis from Lund University, Sweden,
entitled “Justice Denied in the Name of 'Honour': A Study of Honor Killing
between Human Rights and 'Shari'a' in Egypt” (Fall 2009)
............................................
Published in Arabic on Assafir Al-Arabi, October 10, 2022
Translated by me
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