Restoring Lost ‘Honor’: Retrieving Face and Identity, Removing Shame, and Controlling the Familial Cultural Environment through ‘Honor’ Murder

‘Honor’ murder or ‘honor’ killing is not identical to a manmurdering a woman in a domestic violence scenario. An ‘honor’ killinginvolves the death of a female family member who is murdered by one or more male family members, sometimes with the active assistance of other women related to the victim. In ‘honor’ murder, a female family member is deemed by her male relatives to have transgressed the family’s honor. Unsurprisingly, ‘honor’ murders are historically underreported because of the shame the victim brought to her family. Analyses of ‘honor’ murder cases, therefore, are scarce. I examine the 2007 strangulation of Aqsa Parvez, an ‘honor’ murder victim, through the theoretical lenses of face/shame and the social bond (Scheff, 2000), identity/social identity theory (Stets & Burke, 2000), and Black’s (1983) theory of crime as social control (cited in Gauthier & Bankston, 2004). Then, I deconstruct the conflict leading to Aqsa’s murder through the conflict mapping modeldevised by Wehr (1979).