Honor, Shame, Friends, and Therapy

Posted on December 2, 2003 in Morals & Ethics Suicide

Nurse Ratched has commented on the story of a Palestinian Mother who killed her 17 year old daughter. Ratched’s commentary is succinct:

This woman killed her daughter — even, apparently, disobeying the will of her husband to do so — because of the strength of cultural taboo against ‘impure’ women. I understand that it is best for their society not to have any more unwed or unsupported mothers than already occur as a result of war, famine, accidents, and other common causes, and a strong cultural taboo against pre-marital and extra-marital relations is helpful in that regard….the girl was raped rather than a willing participant, and it is unlikely there was anything else she could have done to protect herself. Not allowing her to come home, sending her to live the life of a religious penitent, or shunning or ostracizing her would still have had the effect of enforcing the useful cultural taboo and discouraging other girls from having sex outside of marriage.

Honor and shame societies have long been criticized for their debasement of women. I, like Ratch, feel strongly that murdering the victim is not an appropriate response. But Ratch’s suggestions of alternatives to murder do not sound to me like they are much better than the act which Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud committed:

Armed with a plastic bag, razor and wooden stick, Qaoud entered her sleeping daughter’s room last Jan. 27. “Tonight you die, Rofayda,” she told the girl, before wrapping the bag tightly around her head.

Next, Qaoud sliced Rofayda’s wrists, ignoring her muffled pleas of “No, mother, no!” After her daughter went limp, Qaoud struck her in the head with the stick.

Killing her sixth-born child took 20 minutes, Qaoud tells a visitor through a stream of tears and cigarettes that she smokes in rapid succession. “She killed me before I killed her,” says the 43-year-old mother of nine. “I had to protect my children. This is the only way I could protect my family’s honor.”

Before I proceed, let me note that this phenomenon is not peculiar to Islam*. The classic study of the system — J.K. Campbell’s 1964 study Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community focuses on Christian shepherds. The Catholic church gave implicit approval to the idea of dying for your virginity when it canonized St. Maria Goretti in 1950. The cult of virgin martyrs goes far back into Christian history. Sephardic Jews have also held this world view. Honor and Shame societies fringe the Mediterranean, only reflecting religion insofar as the participants were willing to quote it as rationalization for their acts of murder and suicide.

It should not be seen as part of a “culture of poverty”: when I lived in Athens, Greece, I often saw adult women walking hand in hand with their chaperones. A 1980 television film (Death of a Princess) dramatized a journalist’s investigation of the execution of a member of the House of Saud and her lover, an action “legally based on tribal rather than Quranic law.”

I am not so relativist that I turn a blind eye to the way that Qaoud turned her daughter into a victim twice over. I also don’t accept the interpretation that this is all because of Israel, though the Israeli occupation certainly has an effect on the affairs of the oppressed Palestinian people. Honor and Shame accompanies centuries of occupation, dating back to the Roman period or perhaps even before. It may or may not be related to foreign interventions and state violence.

Ratch’s alternatives amount to an attempt to save the daughter’s life after the fact of her rape by her own brothers and murder by her own mother. But they continue to place an undeserved burden of guilt on the girl. I think we can suggest better. We can seek to break the cycle of Honor and Shame by providing escapes. Palestinians and others can begin by educating their own in their own way and demanding truly safe and apolitcal shelters for victims of domestic violence.

Elsewhere, I have seen the culture of therapy ridiculed by Phillip Greenspun:

Three hundred years ago friends needed to empathize with one another. Today anyone who wishes to get sympathy for his or her troubles can simply buy it from one of the hundreds of thousands of trained professionals in the therapy industry.

It’s the vision of the “good old days” that Greenspun invokes. The life and death of Rofayda Qaoud shows that the good old days had a very different face from Greenspun’s idealized world: victims were shamed, ostracized, turned out of families for crimes committed on them. Therapy may seem like packaged soap on a shelf to Greenspun, but it is a superior alternative to the culture of honor and shame that slew Rofayda Qaoud.

I do not doubt that one reason why therapy has supplanted placing one’s secrets in friends is that therapists are required to keep confidences and may lose their license for it. You cannot hold a friend to the same standard.

The old ways could have a nasty face. Families could become very uncompassionate, friends could turn into enemies or biased observers for the mere appearance of impropriety. It happened, even in Western society. (Hasn’t Greenspun read Tess of the D’Urbervilles which documents the failure of English family and friends to compassionately deal with a rape?) I can do without the good old days when we kept matters of domestic violence to ourselves. Rofayda Qaoud deserved shelter and understanding. If she couldn’t find it within her family and her circle of friends, why couldn’t she go outside of that box for it?

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*Neither Ratch nor I make this error.