Check for updates Article Death by family: Honor violence as punishment Mark Cooney University of Georgia, USA Punishment & Society 2014, Vol. 16(4) 406-427 @ The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1462474514539537 pun.sagepub.com SSAGE Abstract Occurring in a broad range of non-western and western countries, violence committed against women in the name of family honor has been viewed in several ways, including as a crime, as gendered violence, or as a violation of human rights. But from a purely explanatory point of view, family honor violence is most profitably viewed as a type of social control, specifically penal social control. As punishment, honor violence appears to obey the same principles as other forms of punishment. Drawing on the theoretical strategy of pure sociology, the present article highlights two such principles: punishment increases with the social distance and social inferiority of the offender. These twin principles help to explain a broad range of facts about when and where family honor violence will occur, and how severe - in particular, how lethal - it will be. Keywords family punishment, honor violence, violence against women Punishment is of two principal types: legal and non-legal. Of the two, legal pun- ishment administered by state officials attracts the lion's share of scholarly and popular attention. Yet informal punishment is surely far more frequent. For every person fined, placed on probation, incarcerated, or executed many more are likely scolded, deprived of goods or services, have their pocket money or pay docked, placed in time out, sent to the Principal's office, demoted, fired, assigned unpleasant tasks, shunned, jeered, expelled, or beaten. The disproportionate emphasis is understandable - legal punishment is more public and better documented. But it is not justifiable: the study of punishment cannot privilege one form over another. The present article seeks to provide some balance by addressing the social condi- tions underlying an increasingly prominent (though not necessarily increasingly Corresponding author: Mark Cooney, Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-1611, USA. Email: mcooney@uga.edu
Cooney 407 frequent) species of non-legal punishment: violence against women in the name of family honor. Those conditions, it will be argued, are some of the same principles that appear to underlie variation in punishment more generally. Honor is a type of social status based not on wealth, leadership, participation, or education, but on force (Black, 2011: 71). Typically associated with masculinity, challenges to honor require a violent response or risk of loss of social standing. Violence directed toward enhancing or defending honor is of two main types. The more common form arises out of contests of dominance and physical courage, and usually involves men (see, for example, Nisbett and Cohen, 1996; Peristiany, 1966; Spierenburg, 1998). The second type - the subject of this article - primarily targets women for disobedience, especially unauthorized sexual relationships, and is said to be committed to uphold the honor of a family or other group, and especially its male members (see, for example, Kardam, 2005; Van Eck, 2003; Wikan, 2008).1 Perpetrated