Farzana Parveen was 25-years-old and three months pregnant when she was stoned to death by members of her own family outside of a court house in Lahore, Pakistan as passersby watched on, making no efforts to save her. The story sent shockwaves through the country and even led to death sentences for those involved. But cases like that of Parveen, who was killed because she married against her family’s wishes, are sadly prevalent. It’s just that they don’t often make the news, much less face trial.
In patriarchal societies like Pakistan, women often bear the burden of a family’s honor — which their parents or spouses might feel is compromised when a woman marries according to her own wishes or else seeks a divorce. In some instances, male relatives or husbands have lashed out at women because of a mere suspicion that she is having an extramarital relationship. While a man may well be involved with her, the vast majority of those killed under the pretense of maintaining a family’s honor are women.
“Honor crimes” stem from “a desire to control the behavior of women and girls within a community,” especially in terms of their relationships and sexuality, according to a United Nations 2014 report which estimated that around 5,000 women around the world are murdered by their families in such crimes, though the number might be four times that high.
The majority of cases are believed to be in South Asian countries like Pakistan, but few capture headlines the way Parveen’s case did. Had she been killed in her home village nearly 60 miles from the bustling metropolis, it’s unlikely that anyone would have heard of her tragic faith.
“It’s a very common practice,” Rafia Asim, who tracks figures on honor killings for the Human Rights Commission (HRCP) of Pakistan told ThinkProgress in an interview.
She notes that there’s an “aspect of domestic violence” to honor crimes, but what differentiates them is “the element of honor or supposed honor that is felt by the male members of the family of a woman. In honor crimes, there will always be a woman in the equation.”
Asim, who oversees a team of monitors across the country says that she receives reports of about 30 honor killings each month from only about 60 districts out of more than 200.
“They are basically our eyes and ears on the ground,” Asim says of the dozens of monitors that have gone through international training programs to be able to identify and report crimes like honor killings to the HRCP.
According to the monitors’ findings as well as some media reports, the HRCP counted more than a thousand people were killed in honor-related crimes in Pakistan last year, a 15 percent increase over the previous year. Since many of these deaths occur in remote and volatile areas, a small fraction of these were ever reported by national media outlets.
“The majority of the cases that we get are not in any newspapers,” Asim said. “The areas that we work in, there are no NGOs there, there are no journalists there anymore, so there’s no news coming out of those areas. The reports that we get [of honor killings] are the only ones, really.”
While she does make her findings public, they’re often buried in annual reports that don’t often get cited by national or local media — and don’t allow for up-to-date figures or disaggregate information by the specific localities where the crimes may be committed.
That’s why Asim thought it was so important to create a centralized platform to display the startling figures — and make note of the human stories behind them. Asim participated in a data bootcamp sponsored by the International Center for Journalists last May where she teamed up with journalists, designers, and developers to create an easily updatable platform to keep viewers informed of instances of honor killings in the country.
Their project, called Visualizing Honor Crimes in Pakistan, won first place at a hackathon which took place during the bootcamp. It allows viewers to click through various regions of the country to see where honor crimes are most prevalent and to gain context about each of the crimes — something that rarely happens in the country’s media landscape.
“In Pakistan, there’s a lot of anecdotal reporting,” Rahma Mian, a Knight International Journalism Fellow who helped organize the bootcamp said in a phone interview.
“These stories [of honor killings] get lost in the small, district area stories,” she said. “No reporters keep track on how many cases there have been each month. There’s just not a culture of numbers and working with context, so for Pakistan, this is a great start.”
Mian believes that data-driven, evidence-based reporting would make honor crimes more visible — and help ordinary citizens combat them.
If people were able to identify specific areas where honor crimes are especially prevalent, she said, they could “become a pressure point” for local leaders.
“The legislator from that area could potentially be asked, ‘Why are there so many honor crimes in your district?’” Mian said. “This [sort of visualization] can then go on to have an impact and can also help with policy decisions and development in terms of how much money is invested in particular neighborhoods. The ideal case scenario is pretty amazing if data-driven journalism was happening.”
For Rafia Asim, such information could help ignite a movement to combat honor crimes in a way that hasn’t really happened before.
After the horrifying killing of Farzana Parveen, for instance, people were shocked — but that immediate shock wasn’t enough to sustain long term efforts at combating this particularly pernicious form of gender-based violence.
“It was a brutal act,” Asim said. “It was inhumane, but we couldn’t build a movement around it. It was a one-off thing again. No one came up and said, ‘This is what happened to this woman and to 50 others just this month.’ No one came and said that, so these cases just remain single cases. I felt that we needed to be able to see them in one place and show people how big this issue is.”
So maybe, she said, showing people the scale of the problem will help to combat it.