Lawyers Manual - Unified Court System

376 Dorchen A. Leidholdt
keeping her communication confidential, may protect her from having to marry
against her will.
Victims of child or forced marriages who reject suitors picked by their families
or flee the spouse imposed on them may face retaliation in their home countries,
ranging from ostracism to outright violence and even death. Such persecution
may form the basis of a viable asylum claim, especially if there is evidence that
the government sanctions child or forced marriage and/or is unwilling or unable
to protect girls and young women forced into such arrangements.
Honor Killing
For some victims of domestic violence, their own families pose as much of
a danger as their abusive spouses. 20 In traditional societies in the Middle East,
Pakistan, and Turkey, a family’s honor is measured by the perceived chastity
and fidelity of the women in that family. Even a rumor, however ill-founded,
can stain the family’s honor and leave the men of the family convinced that they
have only one choice: to eliminate the stain by eliminating its perceived source
— the woman or girl who is the subject of the rumor. Although honor killings
are commonly assumed to be punishment for adultery, women and girls have
been threatened with death or killed by their families for leaving the family
compound without an explanation, having a friendly conversation with a male
neighbor, and rejecting a suitor selected by the family. 21
Domestic violence is often a trigger for a threat of honor killing. Jealousy is
a hallmark of batterers, who often become convinced without a shred of evidence
that their wives or girlfriends are cheating on them. When the jealous husband
confides his unfounded suspicions to his wife’s family members in a culture that
supports honor killing, the outcome can be deadly. In one case handled by
Sanctuary for Families, the honor killing plot against an observant young Muslim
mother was triggered by her husband’s contention that a pair of her underwear
was missing. Convinced that she had betrayed him, her husband tortured her by
burning her all over her body with a heated drill bit, taped her forced confession,
left her comatose, and then reported back to her brothers in Syria that his actions
were justified because she was having an affair. The brothers immediately
convened a family meeting at which they concocted a plot to kill her.
Leaving an abusive spouse can also trigger the threat of honor killing. In
another Sanctuary for Families’ case a young mother from the Punjab region of
Pakistan, the region with the highest incidence of honor killings in the world,
fled her abusive husband and entered a domestic violence shelter in Brooklyn.