British Prime Minister Theresa May has said there is “absolutely no honour” in killing women and they should be referred as terror acts.
May was of the opinion that it was criminal to kill women for protecting family’s ‘honour’.
She expressed the views during the Prime Minister’s Questions session in the House of Commons on Wednesday. She was asked by Conservative MP Nus Ghani if she would stop using the word honour for these killings.
“Does the Prime Minister agree that such crimes are in fact acts of terror not honour and will she therefore direct that that her new Government takes the lead by ending the use of the word honour to describe these vile acts, in order to stop any legitimacy to the idea that women are the property of men,” said Ghani.
“She’s absolutely right, extremism does take many forms, that’s why in the government’s counter-extremism strategy we’re looking very widely across the breadths of issues of extremism, including looking at tackling the root causes of some practices within communities, such as the so called honour based violence.
“I absolutely agree with her, there is absolutely no honour in so-called honour-based violence. It is violence and a criminal act, pure and simple,” Theresa replied.
In the United Kingdom alone, some 11,000 crimes related to ‘honour’ have been reported over the last five years. Many of these crimes were committed after refusal from women to get into an arranged marriage, forbidden relationship, and even rape cases.
The discussion on ‘honour’ killings came in the wake of social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch’s murder by her brother on July 16.
“Extremism takes many forms, from the atrocity in Nice to the violent murder of Qandeel Baloch by her own brother in Pakistan, justified as an honour killing,” Ghani told the MPs during her speech.
