re: #156 The Ghost of a Flea

Not to be super depressing, but consider that family annihilators make big press. Dads killing their daughters for whatever reason rarely goes national, and unless it’s sensational there’s not a lot of discussion about the motive of each case. Whenever the subject of honor killings comes up, I always thinking about the fact that we don’t have an equivalent label for “the motive of the dad killing his kid” which sort of makes the discussion of “what we do versus what they do” difficult.

It’s a pointless conversation. You can look at total murder rates between countries. You can identify patterns of behavior between cultures. But there’s simply no way to create some sort of overall worldwide murder metric.

The biggest problem with honor killings, from what I know, is that there’s a tendency in many places to let the perps walk, or for a survivor to be in real danger from other members of the community. That’s the problem—when society condones murder.