JUST WRITE!
Honour and shame
By Tracey Coveart/The Scugog Standard

Let their names be printed here, so that strangers might honour them when their family did not: Zainab Shafia, Sahar Shafia, Geeti Shafia, Rona Mohammad Amir. Read them. Memorize them. Remember them.
_We easily recall names like Guy Paul Morin, Steven Truscott and David Milgaard - men all wrongly convicted of rape and murder and later famously acquitted. But do we remember the names of the victims of those crimes? Christine Jessop, Lynne Harper, Gail Miller. Serial killers Paul Bernardo, Robert Picton and Colonel Russell Williams are practically household names in this country, but can we summon the identity - without a Google search - of any of the women these men stand convicted of killing? Why does the celebrity of infamy attach itself so readily to murderers, while the women who die brutally, tortuously at the hands of these murderers slip quietly and quickly into obscurity?
_Three teenage sisters and their step-mother were delivered to their watery grave in Kingston, Ontario, in June 2009. They were murdered, not by strangers, but by members of their own family: a husband, a co-wife, a stepson; a father, a mother, a brother. On Jan. 29, each of these heinous creatures was convicted of four counts of first degree murder and sentenced to life without parole by a judge who said their crimes stemmed from “a sick notion of honour that has absolutely no place in any civilized society ... a notion of honour that is founded upon the domination and control of women.”
_I refuse to name these cold-blooded, methodical, remorseless killers; they do not deserve to be remembered. Yet, they will be, as they appeal their sentences, as they decompose in federal prison in a puddle of their own honour, while Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona - women who are buried side by side in a Quebec cemetery, their last defiant stand - are forgotten.
_In their memory, their ‘honour,’ we must be careful not to confuse culture with religion. Islam does not justify or condone the killing of women. A culture that has grossly misconstrued a word defined as ‘the quality of knowing and doing what is morally right’ - does. There is no honour in murdering women. And there is no ‘honour killing.’ Not in this country. There is just killing. The Criminal Code of Canada makes no distinction.
_Like the woman who stands convicted, I am a mother. And while my children have vexed me, defied me, even caused me occasional shame, I have never considered killing them for besmirching my good name. Simply typing the words is an exercise in the absurd.
_Still, we are not that far removed in this country from the days when the husband was the de facto head of the household. As such, he was considered perfectly within his rights - morally, if not legally - to keep his wife in her place with the occasional backhand.
_Even today, in our so-called ‘civilized’ society, one in four Canadian women have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of their partner. Sixty-three per cent of these women were victimized on more than one occasion, 32 per cent more than 10 times. Forty-five per cent of incidents of violence committed by a man against his wife result in injury to the wife and 44 per cent of men who are violent to their wife use weapons during the physical attack. Women who are separated from their spouses are at high risk of intimate femicide and are five times more likely to be killed by their intimate partners than other women. Over the period 1974-1992, a married woman was nine times more likely to be killed by her spouse than by a stranger.
_Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona - relative newcomers to this country - paid the ultimate price for their ‘disobedience,’ but the abundance of bruised and battered women in our communities and the shelters that give them refuge is indisputable evidence that violence against women is not just an ‘honour’-bound foreign problem. It is our own shame.