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Lord Giddens: My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Russell-Johnston, for initiating this debate. It is only a shame that so few noble Lords have seen fit to contribute to it. The list of speakers looks a bit like all chiefs and no Indians, especially since the Minister will get to speak for longer than us other humble souls. But in my estimation the debate is much more important than might appear at first sight.

A few years ago, I wrote a book on gender, sexuality and violence, and hence my interest in this topic. What sparked me to write the book was an incident during
 
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the first Iraq war in 1990–91. On the night of 26 to 27 February, the Iraqi army was retreating from Kuwait towards Basra. Noble Lords will remember that the coalition forces attacked a convoy of some 1,500 vehicles from the air. After that attack, the road became known as the "highway of death". We can recall the pictures of the charred bodies of soldiers in their trucks. Aside from the horror of the event, what interested me were the reports made by journalists who, three weeks later, went to look at those abandoned vehicles. They were not allowed on to the scene until then. They found that the vehicles were covered with graffiti written by the coalition forces. These graffiti were dominated by expressions of violence towards women, horrific statements about women and a range of extremely unpleasant and hostile statements about women—not about enemy soldiers but about women. I started to think about the relationship between violence and male sexuality.

It is clear that violence and male sexuality are closely connected. Consider the use of rape in war, for example. Mass rape occurred most recently in the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia. Mass rape in conditions of war is not primarily an expression of sexual desire. It is driven by the desire to possess, it is driven by the desire to dominate and it is driven by the desire to humiliate. Much the same is true of individual rapes which are mostly driven not straightforwardly by sexual desire but by the desire to subjugate and humiliate. The Latin origin of the term "to rape" means "to seize" or "to take possession of". It did not originally have a sexual connotation.

To cut a long story short, having looked at a lot of the literature on male sexuality and violence, I came to the conclusion that there are three core elements that occupy the interface between male sexuality and violence towards women. First, there is the wish—and indeed in traditional cultures, the expectation—of men to control women and assert their power over them. As the noble Lord said, other women sometimes connive in this power over women which men have traditionally enjoyed within the family.

The second element is fear of female sexuality, which consciously or unconsciously is widely felt to be dangerous and which underlay many expressions of violence against women such as the persecution of witches in the middle ages. A constant theme of the traditional family is fear of the sexuality of women, especially young women.

The third element that I thought to be important having surveyed all the evidence was the existence of the double standard in the traditional male-dominated family, the patriarchal family to use sociological jargon. In almost all cultures, the traditional family has a double standard of sexuality in which men are allowed a degree of sexual licence but women are not. Women are expected to be chaste, women are expected to be pure and they are expected to be so even after marriage, not just before. They are expected to be virtuous women in a way which does not have the same connotation for men.
 
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These three motifs are very visibly evident in honour killings. The phrase "honour killings" is plainly a misnomer—there could be nothing much more dishonourable than the acts that are carried out in the name of the honour of the family. Honour killings should be seen in the wider context of male violence towards women and the double standards which underlie such violence.

All cultures in which honour killings are found are also marked by other forms of violence towards women, especially institutions geared towards the ritual humiliation of women. Humiliation and shame are ever-present emotions surrounding the context in which honour killings and other forms of violence towards women take place. As the noble Lord mentioned, it is true that there are some honour killings against boys and adult men, but they are very rare. Nearly all honour killings are directed against women and this is surely not incidental.

We should not think of honour killings as being linked to non-western civilisations, cultures "out there" that are alien to our own western culture. That is not the case. In the west, honour killings have existed at least since Roman times where they are well documented. In Roman times honour killings were sanctioned in law. Later they became prohibited in law in the middle ages and afterwards. In Rome the paterfamilias had the right to kill an unmarried sexually active daughter or adulterous wife and we know from evidence that this was practised widely in different phases of the Roman Empire. The practice seems to have lasted at least up until the 16th or 17th centuries in the west, in Italy and in other areas in Europe. For example, we have the documented case of Laura Lanza, Baroness of Carini in southern Italy, who was murdered by her father in 1563. Her crime was adultery within marriage. Her father murdered her. He served a short sentence of military service—service that helped his career—and he used that as a springboard to become even more affluent and successful in the local community. So he virtually escaped punishment altogether.

When we think of these things as alien, we should also bear in mind our own legacy in Victorian times. Then, of course, you did not have honour killings but you did have its social equivalent. In Victorian times, a woman was still the chattel of a man. In law, a woman was the property of her husband and he had rights which the woman did not have. Unmarried women who gave birth to children—or, indeed, who were known to have a sexual relationship—suffered social death and ostracism. Even into the 20th century, the barbaric practice of locking-up such women in mental hospitals continued. You may remember seeing in the press a few months ago examples of women who had been in mental institutions for some 30 years up until about 10 years' ago. What was their crime? It was to have a child outside of marriage. So our society is by no means free of these tendencies.

I remember that in my family, when I was a kid of about five or six, we had this Aunt Laura, who sat in a corner of the room at parties. She looked miserable
 
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and no one spoke to her. My mother explained to me, "Well, that's Aunt Laura. She's divorced, you know". At that time there was a social stigma attached to being divorced, even though her husband had left her and she had not left him. Of course, it was very difficult for wives to leave their husbands in those days. So our society is by no means free of the impulsions and imperatives which underline honour killings more generally.

As the noble Lord, Lord Russell-Johnston, said, honour killings are a global problem today, especially in the more traditional cultures across the world. They have come to western European countries, some of which were mentioned by the noble Lord. In the UK, as we know from police work which went back through murders over a certain period, there have been possibly as many as 100 honour killings over 10 years. But this figure is unreliable for the reasons given by the noble Lord. There are pressures towards suicide, which would not figure in the statistics, and we know of cases where girls have been taken out of the country and murdered. So these figures are not reliable and are almost certainly an underestimate.

Interestingly, in Germany the police have also been considering cases involving the murder of young women over the past few years since 1997. The police there calculate that there have been 45 honour killings in that country since 1997, although, again, the statistics remain problematic.

A striking feature of the countries and communities where honour killing exists today is that they are predominately Islamic-based societies. I am sure that some people refer to the fact that honour killing is banned in Islam and that most Islamic clerics across the world speak out against it. However, I would argue strongly that the practice of honour killing has nothing to do with religion or is, at most, tangentially associated with religion. The greater incidence of honour killing in Muslim communities, in my view, is almost solely due to the fact that the traditional family is much stronger. These communities are much more embedded in tradition and custom than most communities across the world today and, as I mentioned, the traditional family has always been patriarchal; has always been based on control of women's fertility and sexuality.

We know that even today there are honour killings going on in cultures which are non-Islamic. There are documented examples among Hindus and Sikhs, in some cultures in sub-Saharan Africa and, interestingly, because it brings it closer to home, in 19th century Latin America.

What should we do? I do not dissent from any of the prescriptions proposed by the noble Lord because they seem to be the kinds of things we must do. We cannot any longer treat this as a cultural activity; it must be subjected to international law, to national law and to human rights.

In conclusion, I have four practical proposals to offer. First, we have to improve our national cultural understanding of minority communities in our midst, and we know that the work of Commander Andy
 
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Baker of the Metropolitan Police has been very important in this regard. We need women's groups close to, or involved in, the relevant communities, to whom women who are threatened are able to turn. It is very difficult, but they must be groups who are sensitised to local community values.

Secondly, we cannot tackle the issue of honour killing in Britain by concentrating only on Britain because it is essentially a trans-national problem. An important breakthrough was made when the district court of Stockholm became the first European court to sentence two men for honour killings abroad. It is an important precedent which other countries should gear themselves up to follow. I should like to see a stronger United Nations programme and even the possible consideration of a year when member states agree that the practice of honour killing should be totally eliminated across the world. It seems like a traditional illness, if you like. Some illnesses have been conquered. Why can we not conquer this one across the world? I believe that we can, through a concerted effort by the international community.

Thirdly, the best medium-term protection against honour killings is the education of women and their detachment from the traditional family. People talk of globalisation. There is a process of globalisation going on, but the advance of women across the world is just as important a feature of globalisation as any other; it is a true global revolution in the position of women. It has not yet reached some of these traditional cultures, but it will do so. I do not have much time for the traditional family. As my noble friend Lord Parekh will probably remember, Edmund Leach talked in his reflections of the tawdry nature of the traditional family with its "tawdry secrets" as he described it. That is a very nice phrase. People speak of a return to Victorian values, which is ridiculous because the Victorian family embodied the very values that we must overcome if we are to liberate women from the wider spectrum of violence.

In conclusion, I would argue that the position of Turkey has a crucial significance in this debate. Quite a few of the honour killings in Germany have been in Turkish communities. Turkey stands as a potential accession country to the European Union. It has passed new legal prescriptions from 2003–04. The first ever life sentences for honour killings in Turkey were given in 2004 but the practice still continues, especially in the south-eastern part of the country. Turkey needs to take the lead; it is a key country. As part of the condition of entering the European Union we should insist that Turkey makes not just a general commitment to human rights but a specific commitment to eradicate this practice.

3.22 pm

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