http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3176/honor-violence-in-america
Other girls, unable to resolve the conflict between submitting to a marriage, and essentially being raped by a stranger – not to mention the physical torture and possible murder if they resist – prefer to end their lives.
Aiya Altemeemi, aged 19, suffered a punishment last February that none of her schoolmates in Phoenix, Arizona could have imagined: her father cut her throat with a kitchen knife. When she escaped to her bedroom, her mother and sisters followed, tied her to her bed, taped her mouth shut, and beat her. And this was not the first time: previously, when Aiya had expressed reservations about marrying the 38-year-old man her parents had chosen as her husband, her mother had shackled her to the same bed and burned her with a hot spoon.
Despite such treatment, Aiya, who arrived from Iraq with her parents around three years ago, soon after announced to stunned reporters that she understood why her mother had assaulted her: “Because I talked to a boy, and that is not normal with her, that is not my religion. My religion says no talking to boys.”
Alhough Aiya’s was among the few to receive media attention, stories like hers are far more common than most people would imagine. In what is known as “honor violence,” mistreatment includes not just beatings, but acid attacks, setting a woman on fire, severing her nose from her face — particularly in Pakistani and Afghan communities — and other forms of mutilation.
Such incidents, which occur mainly in Muslim and Hindu families, have been the focus of attention in Europe for several years — largely thanks to the efforts of Somali-Dutch activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who first brought the problem to light some ten years ago in the Netherlands. Since then, research has uncovered disturbing statistics: 400 to 600 incidents of honor violence are recorded annually in the Netherlands alone, with around 12 honor killings a year each in Germany and the Netherlands. And in England, where the directors of one center say they receive 500 calls for help from victims of honor violence every month, and where police estimate there are between 3,000 and 17,000 incidents of honor violence each year, a recent report contends that one-fifth of all South Asian immigrants believe that “certain acts thought to shame families were justification for violence.”