Dialogues in the Dark

Friday afternoon consisted of two documentaries. The first was called In the Morning, and was a 10-minute dramatization of an honor killing in Turkey. The second, Dialogues in the Dark, dealt with the same subject but provided more detail on the issue and specific cases in the past few years. Between the documentaries there was a short discussion with a female Turkish professor who explained more about the concept of honor killings.

Honor killings occur when a female member of a household does something to “dishonor” her family: she could be raped, she could elope with a young man, she could simply be accused of no longer being a virgin, and any of these “sins” may result in one or more of the male members of her family murdering her, or basically forcing her to commit suicide. It is violence that has been deeply institutionalized and Turkey is now finally acknowledging its seriousness and beginning to punish those men responsible for such killings.

Following the woman’s group Kamer, Dialogues in the Dark teaches its audience about several cases of known honor killings. One involves a 14-year-old girl named Emine. As tradition dictates, Emine was supposed to marry her paternal cousin if he wished to “have her.” He wished, and she refused, and not long after rumors began to circulate about her and another male in the village. Emine was examined by three different gynecologists in order to prove her “innocence.” Their evidence was not conclusive and although she swore that she had done nothing wrong, in the end her estranged cousin strangled her to death. This story was party revealed because Emine knew her life was at risk, and wrote a letter detailing the people she suspected and what events had taken place. She wrote, “If I die, none of you will rest in peace.”

I was bothered by a theme that followed both the documentaries and the live discussion. It is the theme of the other: the horrified, evolved Western audience wheezing in dismay at the backward nature of some, often Muslim, cultural groups. The male interviewer even asked the Turkish professor why people in the Netherlands should be concerned – after all, the issue only related to Muslim women. Often such dialogues dangerously hover at a xenophobic level, and the result more often than not is a greater distrust and disrespect for “the other,” not a greater understanding.

The greatest question is, how is our system any different? We gasp and shake our superior Western heads at the terrible nature of honor killings and how necessary it is to make sure that these men are punished, when our culture holds very similar attitudes towards women. When a woman is raped in one of our great democracies, what do we say?

“She was dressed like a slut – what do you expect?” – “She was so drunk – what kind of woman gets that drunk and hangs out with strange men?” – “She’s making it up – she’s angry that he rejected her, so now she’s accusing him of rape.”

Sure, our fathers and brothers don’t immediately conspire to kill us because our purity is lost, but our society looks on us with the same suspicion bestowed on these women in Turkey.

To me, this vital inconsistency is the most dangerous of all: our sexism may be dressed up with women’s lib, but the deep, dark center of misogyny still lurks, even in the supposedly evolved West.