US media’s practice of manufacturing difference is almost always about constructing and reinforcing the myth of a liberal West as a place beyond patriarchy, misogyny, inequality, despotism, exploitation, racism, and violence. To do this, American journalists outsource pathologies and social ills that affect their societies to the Other, where the issues are presented as culturally, ethnically, or religiously specific to the Other. For example, they will speak about something called “honor killings,” a label given to a uniquely Muslim male pathology of being insecure and vain and driven to kill women they feel have dishonored them.
Violence against women, or entire families, by fathers, brothers, or relatives in the USA are not labeled as “honor killings.” and neither are acts of murder-suicide where a father or husband kills his wife and then later himself. However, if a Muslim or South Asian father or brother murders a daughter or a sister, it is immediately analyzed as an “honor killing.” This is done because Western media assumes that the ‘modern, secular man’ is “not motivated by something called ‘honor,’ and patriarchal violence becomes, by definition, the behavior of the ‘other’ and the violence of the ‘self’ society is understood as random or otherwise motivated.” [Inderpal Grewal, “Outsourcing Patriarchy: Feminist Encounters, Transnational Mediations and The Crime of ‘Honour Killings,’” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:1, 2013:1-19].
The category “honor killings” applies only to non-European, mainly Muslim communities and equally to migrant communities in Europe or the United States. “Honour killings” have become “part of the atrocity exhibition of Western feminisms and Western media as exclusively Arab and Muslim crimes.” [Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism, University of Chicago Press, 2015:172]. The term has taken on a self-explanatory power, but only when it applies to specific communities. And certainly never when speaking about the high levels of violence in European societies.
And yet, levels of close male-related violence against women are a global issue and a considerable concern both in the USA and in Europe. Such violence is not unique in any way to Muslim men, and nor does it warrant a separate category of analysis unless one is working with rather simplistic racial frames of analysis.
Yet, dozens of reportage stories and documentaries, commentaries, and punditry have focused on the unique violence of the Muslim male, which is seen as adjudged a special form of misogyny that can only be understood through his culture and religion.
Intimate and non-partner violence can be found in countries across the globe. A recent report showed that the rate of women killed by intimate partners ranged between 33% in Malta and 91% in Cyprus. In countries with a higher case number, the rate was 54% in Spain, 62% in Portugal, and 63% in Germany. A significant number and rate of women had been killed by other family members (19% of all women killed): 9% in Cyprus, 14% in Germany, 26% in both Portugal and Spain, and 67% in Malta. In some countries like Germany and Spain, the perpetrators of killings of women by other family members were almost exclusively men, and most often adult sons who killed their elderly mothers. In Portugal, considering the total killings perpetrated within a family context, in 39% of cases, women were killed by a son or son-in-law [Report FEM-UnitED, “Comparative Report on Femicide Research and Data in Five Countries,” 2021.]
In the USA, an FBI report (yes, I am using an FBI report) on female homicide revealed that nearly 92% of cases involved women or girls killed by a man they knew, 63% of whom were killed by current husbands, ex-husbands, or current boyfriends. [Violence Policy Center, “When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2018 Homicide Data,” September 2020.] These rates show that in the USA, “female intimate gendered killings happening at a staggering rate of almost three women every day.” [Rose Hackman, “Femicides in the US: the silent epidemic few dare to name,” The Guardian, September 26, 2021.]
When US media reports on these crimes in the USA or Europe, they are labeled either as “crimes of passion” or set aside as merely acts of murder. From O. J. Simpson’s murder of his wife to incidents far less celebrated, these acts of violence by men against their intimate partners are simply assessed on a case-by-case basis and never explained through predetermined answers.
In an infamous case in Sweden in 2002, Fadime Sahindal, whose family were Kurdish immigrants to Sweden, was shot and killed by her father. He was said to have done so to protect the family’s honor. This murder became the focus of a media frenzy. The only explanation that made any sense to the journalists was Islam and the culture of the Kurds [Shahrzad Mojab & Amir Hassanpour, “The Politics and Culture of ‘Honour Killing’: The Murder of Fadime Sahindal,” Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal Special Issue 1: 56–70]. Headlines blared the problem of “honor killings,” a term reserved to underline the particularly insidious and unique nature of the Kurdish male sense of honor and patriarchal domination of women. “
The term ‘honor killing,’” Grewal reminds us, “enables the articulation of this patriarchy in some sites, locations, and communities but not in others – the term sticks to a crime by certain bodies against other bodies” [Inderpal Grewal, “Outsourcing Patriarchy: Feminist Encounters, Transnational Mediations and The Crime of ‘Honour Killings,’” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:1, 2013:1-19]. Western society and integrated immigrants are the ones immune from such base insecurities and misogyny, as they fully encapsulate liberal and human values, “as represented in a practice of free sexuality and personal autonomy [Lila Abu-Lughod, “Seductions of the ‘Honour Crime,’” differences 22 (1): 2011:17–63].
And this is precisely how US journalists covering such crimes report them.
A New York Times story by Benjamin Mueller, Ashley Southall, and Al Baker focused on the murder of a Bronx resident, Alejandro Uribe, of his wife, Nadia Saavedra. [Benjamin Mueller, Ashley Southall, and Al Baker, “A Familiar Pattern in a Spouseʼs Final Act,” New York Times, April 9, 2016]. The writers informed the reader that as “murders in New York City have fallen to record lows in recent years, domestic killings have come to make up an ever larger part of detectives’ workloads.” Although they never attempt to give clear and precise reasons for this rise, they refer to strictly materialist causes when they do.
For instance, they tell us, “Domestic murders occur overwhelmingly in poor neighborhoods, where jobs are scarce and seeking help from city agencies is not necessarily the norm.” Later, they elaborate further on this point and argue that those “without jobs are more likely to abuse their partners, counselors say, in part because they lose their stake in following social norms.
Around 40 percent of domestic homicide victims in New York City from 2004 to 2013 lived in communities with high poverty, compared to about a quarter of the city’s population overall.” Although one counselor they interview offers Mexican culture as a possible explainer, the writers never use this argument as their own. No religious, cultural, ethnic, or patriarchal explanations are provided for the rise in domestic violence in the neighborhood, and neither are these crimes associated with Mexican masculinity or “honor.”
Even non-US media, influenced as it is by Western frames of thought, has fallen victim to these racialized frames. In a story about the significant cases of violence against women in Spain, journalist Lucia Benavides tells us that the issue of “femicide in Spain–defined as the killing of a woman by a man on account of her gender–isn’t new. In 2004, the Spanish government passed a law intended to reduce domestic violence cases, establishing a network of courts specializing in the matter and funneling funds into programs aimed at supporting survivors.” [Lucia Benavides, “Murdered for Being Women: Spain Tackles Femicide Rates,” Al-Jazeera, April 5, 2017].
She then offers us a case of such a crime, where we learn that “Hours before Ana Gomez was murdered by her husband, she had been sent home by the local women’s shelter in Lugo, Galicia. She was told by workers there to ask for a divorce, but when she confronted 29-year-old Jose Manual Carballo on February 11, 2016, he refused to let her leave. He took a shotgun and killed her, later turning himself into the authorities.”
No explanations–cultural, religious, political, or patriarchal–are offered as an explanation for the rise in the number of cases of femicide in Spain. The entire case–clearly one that could be labeled as an “honor killing”–is discussed without the need to resort to essentialist, reductive, or unique labels to describe Spanish male violence against women.
US media assumes that the “modern, secular man” is “not motivated by something called ‘honor,’ and patriarchal violence becomes, by definition, the behavior of the ‘other’ and the violence of the ‘self’ society is understood as random or otherwise motivated” [Ibid.] The category of ‘honor killings’ is applied only to non-Europeans, especially Muslims. “Honor killings” have become “part of the atrocity exhibition of Western feminisms and Western media as exclusively Arab and Muslim crimes” [Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism, University of Chicago Press, 2015:172]. The term has taken on a self-explanatory power. Still, never when speaking about the high levels of gendered violence in Western societies [The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, “Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences,” United States Report, January–February 2011].
Despite their self-proclaimed liberal feminist claims, these reductive media narratives ironically denude Muslim women of complexity, agency, subjectivity, and autonomy and offer them up as helpless, unthinking, and hopeless victims of their culture’s religion and their men. In their quest to rescue Muslim women from Muslim men, journalists coerce and trap Muslim women into reductive caricatures and dehumanized and disarmed objects of Western care.
The “Muslim/Arab woman” exists in Western media discourses in “universal, ahistorical splendor” and is denied historical specificity and constituted as living outside all social relations. [Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Duke University Press, 2004:41]. She is an already formed whole–“Afghan woman” or “Muslim woman”–and spoken of as an already constituted group.
Erased is her location in particular social networks (kinship structures, colonialism, organization of labor), and almost always after the fact as if “these systems existed outside the relations of women with other women, and women with men.” [Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review, No. 30, Autumn, 1988:61-88]. The Muslim or Arab woman is a “sexually oppressed woman” who is placed “within particular systems in the third world,” which are predominantly interpreted “through Eurocentric assumptions.” [Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle; Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” In Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (Eds.) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Indian University Press, 1991:6].
Of course, “since no connections are made between first- and third-world power shifts, it reinforces the assumption that people in the Third World have not evolved to the extent that the West has” [Ibid.] Unsurprisingly, “fertility is the most studied aspect of women’s lives in the third world. This particular fact speaks volumes about the predominant representation of third-world women” [Ibid.]
The third world woman is a truncated being, one whose life is “based on her ‘feminine gender’ (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.),” while the journalists present themselves as “educated, modern, as having control over their bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions” [Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review, No. 30, Autumn, 1988:61-88].
Some cultures can only always be seen and experienced through patriarchy, while others are assumed to have outgrown it. Journalists outsource patriarchy and then let it do its work elsewhere, in geographies and communities racialized and ethnicized. “Such outsourcing,” Grewal points out, “requires that many in the USA believe that patriarchy no longer exists or that if it does, it is limited to zones that are believed to be anachronistic to the rest of the country” [Inderpal Grewal, “Outsourcing Patriarchy: Feminist Encounters, Transnational Mediations and The Crime of ‘Honour Killings,’” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:1, 2013:1-19].
I am not arguing here that these pathologies–domestic violence, a close male relative violence, child brides, and others–do not exist in the world. Nor that we should not be reporting on them. I am arguing that constructing them as unique to the Other, as driven by issues of “rigid” cultures and “backward” ways, while remaining silent about the prevalence of the same pathologies in the self-fashioned and self-claimed “modern” West, is disingenuous and sensationalist. It is a practice that Western journalists intentionally adopt to construct differences and write about the Other less to tell us something about them and more to allow us to celebrate ourselves as “not that.”
And perhaps most egregiously, by producing these narratives along racialized lines, it helps foreclose the possibility of more historicized, multi-dimensional, and transnational analysis.