Public event in Montreal confronts honour-based violence

I’m honoured to announce that I’ll be speaking at an event in Montreal in May, sponsored by the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership and the Rona Amir Foundation. The event, Honour Crimes in Canada: Tackling Some Difficult Questions, is free and open to all, though registration is required. It’s an important debate that must continue in Canada, four years after Zainab Shafia, 19, her sisters Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad (inset), 50, were found dead in a submerged car in a shallow canal in eastern Ontario.

Since 2000, at least 15 people have been victims of violent honour crimes in Canada that led to convictions, according to my research. Another high-profile case concluded in Toronto in November last year, when Peer Khairi was convicted of second-degree murder in the honour killing of his wife Randjida in 2008. It is likely that many cases of honour-based violence in Canada are undocumented because many front-line responders still have little to no training in identifying this complex problem.

Murder isn’t the only concern. It is one outcome on a continuum of violence and domination. Forced marriages and extreme control over the social habits of young women are signals that a family subscribes to an oppressive honour code. Youth protection agencies in Montreal have acknowledged that they did not understand or recognize honour-based violence at the time that the events unfolded in the Shafia case. Police and prosecutors who handled the Shafia killings had no experience with honour crimes before the case.

There have not been any concerted efforts in Canada to quantify the scope of the problem, as has been done in England. A nine-month pilot completed in 2007-08 in four jurisdictions covered by the Crown Prosecution Service uncovered 35 cases of forced marriage and other honour crimes. This research, and other efforts, has led to a co-ordinated response that recognizes the extreme vulnerability of victims who may feel highly intimidated. British authorities are now flagging all cases where honour-based motives are suspected in forced marriage, assault or other crimes.