Forty years ago, when I asked for my right to study, my family did not beat or kill me. Instead, they married me to the Quran — a symbolic punishment meant to end education without bloodshed. I was just 16 and continued to resist. My parents disowned me and sent me to live with my elder sister, who already had two young daughters and more responsibility than she could afford.

They did not kill me. But they tried to kill my passion for education. That, too, is how ‘honour’ works.

It does not always arrive with knives or ropes. Sometimes it comes quietly — through banishment, emotional exile, and the calculated narrowing of a woman’s future. Survival is permitted; ambition is not.

And it is important to say this clearly. It was not culture, religion, or society that forced my parents’ hand, that shaped the fate of a Banaz Mahmod, or that authorised the sexual violence inflicted on a Mukhtar Mai. It was, and remains, a system.

A system that encourages misogynistic and patriarchal societies by promoting a well-established and carefully managed propaganda: One that teaches families that control is duty, that punishment is protection, and that a woman’s autonomy is a threat to collective order.

System of Erasure

January marked 20 years since the cold-blooded murder of Banaz Mahmod, a young woman of Kurdish origin in Britain whose own father and male relatives arranged her rape and killing. Banaz was 20 years old. She repeatedly went to the police. She named the men who threatened her and ultimately killed her. She asked for protection — and they dismissed her.

Her death exposed not only the brutality of honour-based violence, but the failure of institutions in her adopted country that could not recognise ‘honour’ as a lethal political system, viewing it instead as a ‘cultural complication.’ The state did not order Banaz’s murder, but it enabled her death through disbelief, delay, and the quiet downgrading of a woman’s fear.

Around the same period, in rural Punjab, Pakistan, a jirga, a council of elders in the community, sentenced Mukhtar Mai to gang rape in punishment for a crime she had not committed — her brother’s alleged offence. The expectation was familiar and absolute: shame would do the rest. She would kill herself. The problem would disappear.

She did not. Mukhtar Mai went to the police. She testified in court. She named her attackers. When the government awarded her compensation, she refused to disappear. Instead, she built schools for girls — transforming an act designed to erase her, into action that has educated hundreds. Her survival was not accidental; it was a political disruption of a system that relies on women’s silence.

These stories are often told as isolated tragedies, one in Britain, one in Pakistan, but they belong to the same political logic. ‘Honour’ is activated when women refuse compliance. Violence follows when control begins to fail.

Logic of Backlash

That logic is visible today. In January 2026 two young couples were murdered in northern India under circumstances widely reported as acts of ‘honour’. In one instance, community members beat and killed an unmarried couple in a village in Etah district on 11 January. And in Moradabad, the brothers of a girl who was involved in an interfaith relationship murdered the couple and buried them. Police discovered the bodies on 22 January.

These killings were not excesses of private anger; they were community-sanctioned enforcement, carried out openly as warnings to others. Public violence here serves to remind communities what happens when women - and men - step outside prescribed social boundaries.

Europe is not the exception many imagine it to be. Recent reporting from the Netherlands described the killing of a young woman labelled ‘Westernised’ by the media — a daughter whose father ordered his sons to murder her, and who was drowned in a swamp. The language is telling. ‘Westernised’ is not an explanation; it is a code. It signals a woman who refused prescribed limits — in dress, movement, relationships, or independence — and was therefore marked as a threat.

This did not occur in a society without law or gender equality frameworks. It occurred in Europe. The young woman was of Syrian origin, but as with Banaz Mahmod in Britain, the violence was not produced by culture or religion, but by a system that teaches families that control is responsibility and punishment is moral correction.

This pattern is not confined to so-called honour-based societies. It is visible wherever patriarchal mindsets assume entitlement to the bodies of the vulnerable, expecting silence. As the Jeffrey Epstein files revealed, it’s not only individual criminality, but a wider mindset that allows exploitation and oppression — one in which wealth, status, and institutional protection allow systematic exploitation while society looks away. The geography differs, but the underlying logic of control and impunity remains strikingly familiar.

Media portrayals that cast perpetrators as individual ‘monsters’ may satisfy outrage, but they obscure the deeper reality: ‘Honour’-based violence is sustained by a propaganda that normalises misogyny and reframes coercion as care.

What links these cases — Pakistan, Britain, India, the Netherlands — is not geography or faith, but backlash. ‘Honour’ is used as a pretext to kill not because women are obedient, but because they are not. It is activated when women seek education, choose partners, leave abusive homes, testify in public, or simply insist on being treated as full human beings.

Honour is not Culture

For every woman killed in the name of ‘honour’, there are many more who escape, resist, and survive — often quietly, without recognition. Their survival rarely makes headlines, but it is precisely this growing refusal that provokes violence. ‘Honour’ is not a stable tradition; it is a system under pressure.

If anniversaries matter, they should not only memorialise the dead. They should interrogate the structures that enabled these deaths — and acknowledge the changes now threatening those structures.

Banaz Mahmod’s murder forced reforms in British policing and risk assessment. Mukhtar Mai’s resistance exposed the brutality of informal justice and reshaped global conversations about sexual violence. Yet honour-based killings persist because misogynistic systems adapt faster than accountability.

Forty years after my own punishment for wanting to study, and twenty years after Banaz Mahmod was killed, the lesson remains the same. Honour is not culture. Honour is not religion. Honour is power — defended through propaganda, enforced through fear, and challenged every time a woman refuses to disappear. And refusal, however dangerous, remains the beginning of change.

(The author is a journalist, author, and PhD researcher at SOAS, University of London. Her doctoral research examines misogyny as political radicalisation across South Asia and diaspora contexts, with a focus on digital hate and honour-based violence. By special arrangement with Sapan)