There have been 3000 of them over the past seven years.
According to the numbers collected by the Aurat Foundation, three thousand women were killed for honour, most by their own family members.
Their short lives and grotesque deaths were documented in short, perfunctory paragraphs in the back pages of Pakistan’s newspapers, the daughter of one, the sister of another, all of them dead.
Some were stoned, some were burned and some were buried alive.
Also read: Murder for 'honour': Over 3,000 victims in seven years
All of them died at the hands of their own, for the crime of exercising their will against the desires of the men, husbands, fathers, brothers who owned them. Every now and then came a particularly horrendous case, with circumstances more dire than most, ruthlessness and cruelty beyond the usual horrors and so it occupied the fevered attentions of the still living for a few minutes longer.
The case of Farzana Parveen was one of those. Her stoning outside the Lahore High Court shocking the flailing conscience of a nation used to brutality.
Farzana had gone there to seek help against her own; those who had opposed her marriage, those that wished her dead. She almost made it, almost escaped, becoming one of the three thousand whose spilled blood is for their killers a ritual of restoration. Farzana Parveen had come to plead to the court that she was not a commodity. Her family killed her before she could make it inside.
This past Wednesday, another court sentenced Farzana Parveen’s father and brother to death for her murder; a punishment that will be reduced to life imprisonment owing to the moratorium on executions. Two other men were also sentenced to 10 years in prison and a fine for participating in the stoning.
But, while these neatly and expeditiously imposed sentences may have rendered justice in Farzana Parveen’s case, the loopholes that enabled the three thousand other murders to go unpunished remain wide and gaping and available for future killers.
In Farzana Parveen’s case a state prosecutor brought charges on her behalf. It is this fact that enabled her killers to be caught and punished since the matter could not be resolved among the family and the crime conveniently forgiven by the very people who orchestrated it.
In this last fact, lies the answer to what must be done to prevent honour killings in Pakistan.
Editorial: Crimes of ‘honour’
Unless crimes of honour are made crimes against the state and special provisions are made for them to be tried by state prosecutors, their numbers will continue to swell. In order to do this, an exception must be made to the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance that currently permits these crimes to be forgiven by the kin of the killers.
While forgiveness and a disavowal of vengeance, the principles behind the Ordinance are venerable goals, an exception is necessary in the case of women killed in honour crimes.
This is because the concept of Qisas (retribution) and Diyat (blood money) is operable only in situations in which the killer and the victim are two separate entitles, thus making the grant of mercy and forgiveness a valid one.
In honour crimes there is no such thing, a father whose daughter was killed by his son is in legal terms a conflict of interest that precludes him from granting forgiveness for his daughter’s murder.
Also read: A country of dead women
Life is precarious in Pakistan, the lives of women particularly so. The 3000 women that have already died are a testament to that reality.
So routine and normalised is the killing of women that it is difficult to extract much more than a desultory shrug or a resigned sigh from the silent millions who are witness to the carnage.
But while the apathy may enable ignorance, even blindness, it does not excuse or absolve.
If women are to be considered human beings, equal citizens, bearers of constitutional rights, builders of the nation, then it is crucial that the state of Pakistan consider their murders crimes that must be prosecuted by the state, not sometimes or every now and then, but all, each and every time.