WITH lethal, bludgeoning, battering blows, that make sickening thud as wooden stick meets soft, beautiful head, proud father lands each blow on his beloved daughter.
Limp eyes look up with horror, as very hands that protected all these years now cruelly turn oppressor.
“Father!” she feebly cries, “It is me your daughter!”
But his ears, blinded by a seething anger raging within, hear no sound except the taunt of friends, the rebuke of family, as he deals another and yet another on her now disfigured messy mass.
She finally lies a huddled lump, and sightless eyes stare vacantly, as one lone tear creeps down dead face, wondering how loved one could her murderer be.
It’s an honour killing, and you could easily be the honourable one! What I write so despairingly, graphically above are killings when a father or brothers more concerned over what people think of them, kill those who they love.
Honour killing, it’s called! But even as you shake your head and say, “These killings need to stop!” do you realize many of us are killers too? Killing our children with weapons worse than stick or rod!
“How long since you’ve spoken to your daughter?” I ask. “Bob, from the time, she ran away with that boy, she is not my daughter!” And the honour horror tales go on.
Boys and girls being verbally bludgeoned by their parents, because either he was not good enough, or she not fair enough or submissive enough, or just that they had nothing to do with the choosing.
Children battered not with stick, knife or iron rod, but with sharp tongue, snide remarks, not just for choice of husband or wife, but performance, career, or life decisions; “What will my friends say, when they see your marks!” “You want to be a musician? I forbid you to! What will my relatives think?” “You want to wear those clothes? Never! What will our neighbours say?”
Honour killings start with small kills, then as the honourable murderer grows in confidence, killings get larger and more gruesome, till like the poor girl we mentioned, she lies dead, battered by her father and maybe the mother and brothers too, I see alongside, thousands of boys and girls many grown up, who have been equally beaten with lashing statements, or abandoned all for some mistaken sense of honour.
This isn’t honour, this is cowardice! Instead of standing up for our bold or different child, we cower behind the responses of friends or relatives.
Let’s stop this senseless killing, so at the end of your parenting years you hear, “Thank you dad, thank you ma, for handling me wisely, even while I was making a mistake!” or would you much rather have relatives and friends, hand you a medal of honour, over a child whose spirit you killed? Choose, whose honour you’d like to have..!
