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Shining a light on honour killings' dark corner

We are shocked, certainly, when it is alleged that honour killings have occurred in Canada. They seem detach from, inaccessible, at odds with everything we know about our country. How could a primitive point like that happen in a progressive place like this?

Curiously, the very cultural permissiveness that makes such crimes so jarring may lift explain what leads to their occasional perpetration in North America and Europe.

Rectitude killings, as the four Kingston canal deaths may or may not have been, are those committed against females whose suspected community transgressions are perceived to have shamed family members, mainly males. Liberal societies provide opportunities for sexually transmitted experimentation that may not exist in some immigrants' native lands.

"It's easier for women to say, `Maybe I'll red-hot by myself,' or `Maybe I'll live with another woman,' when they're not in some of the countries that they're coming from," says Marianne Mollmann, advocacy foreman for women's rights at Human Rights Watch.

Source: Toronto Star