Honor Killing in Pakistan: CSS 2017 Short Note

Exam question: CSS 2017: Short note: Honor Killing.

Syllabus area: Section VIII: Gender-Based Violence of CSS Gender Studies.

Short answer

(a) Definition and the concept critique

Honor killing is the murder of a woman, usually by her own family, to restore the male “honor” she is held to have damaged. The definition of “dishonor” is terrifyingly wide: talking to a boy, being dropped home, a letter or an SMS, an alleged affair, eloping, or simply marrying by her own choice. The concept critique must open the note, because it is the note’s real subject: a woman’s “honor” is wrongly tied to men, as if she were not an individual, the line is “we are our own honor.” The killing is therefore not an act of morality but the power structure at its extreme: the woman’s life treated as the currency of male reputation.

(b) Origin and practice

The practice is not religious in origin: its recorded lineage runs from the Roman Empire through the French Penal Code into its present concentration in Muslim countries, a cultural inheritance wearing a moral costume.
Its local form includes Karo-Kari, and its enabling geography is the rural and tribal areas, where police historically did not interfere, a girl killed, buried, and the matter closed unreported.
The documentary record is clear: “A Licence to Kill” documents the practice, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness” (the story of Saba, the nineteen-year-old survivor) carried it to the Oscars.

(c) The legal loophole and its closing

The law’s fatal flaw was the forgiveness loophole: because the killer was the family, the family would then “forgive” him, and he walked home free.
The 2009 legislation kept forgiveness but attached imprisonment of 11-14 years, and the anti-honor-killing reforms thereafter progressively closed the escape.
The precedent that changed the doctrine is the Qandeel Baloch case: the State made itself a party (invoking Article 25) and refused the family’s forgiveness, establishing that honor killing is murder against the state, not a private wrong the family may pardon.

(d) Why it persists, and the strategy line

It persists on the machinery: the jirga that formalizes it, the police that file it as “sudden death,” the male peer support that calls the killer honorable, and the silence that keeps roughly ninety percent of cases against women unreported.
The strategy line is the discipline’s standing rule: certainty of punishment, with the state as permanent party so that forgiveness can never again be purchased inside the family that did the killing, and never write public hanging.

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Last updated: 2 November 2026.

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