Crimes of Honour and the documentary record of so-called honour killings

The hardest stretch of Crimes of Honour to sit through has no violence in it. A brother gives his reasons for killing his sister, a sister he says he loved, and the reasons hang together. That coherence is far more disturbing than any reconstruction could be.

Shelley Saywell made the film in 1999, in association with CBC. It runs about 56 minutes and was shot in Jordan and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Its subject is the killing of women by male relatives who have decided that the woman dishonoured the family. The film treats that decision as something to be examined, never as something to be explained away.

The offences that can bring on such a verdict make a short, bleak list. A family may suspect that a daughter is no longer a virgin. She may refuse the husband chosen for her, or leave one who beats her. She may have been raped. Or people may simply be talking about her. Pause on that last one: it means a woman can be condemned without having done anything at all.

Three kinds of witness

The film meets three groups of people, and how it weighs them is where its intelligence lies.

First come women living in hiding from their own families. Their lives have narrowed to one condition. They stay alive by staying out of sight of the people who raised them. Any documentary that films women in this position has to decide whether they are exhibits, figures whose job is to be pitied, or adults with judgment about their own situations. Saywell's interest is plainly in the second.

Then there is the brother. Giving a killer screen time is always a gamble, because a camera lends a measure of authority to anyone who speaks into it. The case for doing it anyway is that hearing the reasoning is part of refusing it. A viewer who has listened to the justification spoken plainly will know it later when it comes back in gentler clothes: a defence submission, a relative's interview with a newspaper, a comment under an article.

The third group is the smallest. A few women have given themselves to protecting young women in danger, and they are the film's moral centre. Their presence changes what kind of document this is. Without them it would be a record of what happened. With them it is also a record of what some people were doing about it, which is a more useful thing to leave an audience holding.

The reporting that came first

Documentaries rarely find a subject alone. Through the 1990s the Jordanian journalist Rana Husseini was reporting honour crimes for The Jordan Times, case by case, at a time when such deaths were widely treated as private family business. Her book Murder in the Name of Honor followed in 2009.

The law was part of the story too. For many years Jordan's penal code allowed reduced sentences in some killings of this kind, and reformers inside the country campaigned for a long time to change it. A film cannot win a legal argument. What it can do is set individual lives against the abstractions of a statute, so that a phrase like "reduced sentence" acquires a name and a family.

Watching Crimes of Honour beside that reporting is instructive. Daily journalism of Husseini's kind accumulates. One case follows another until the pattern can no longer be denied. A broadcast hour works the other way, by depth, staying with a few people long enough for a viewer to feel the weight of their circumstances. The two forms need each other, and the film is best understood next to that body of reporting rather than as a lone exposé.

There is also the matter of who holds the camera. A Canadian director working in Jordan and the West Bank is an outsider, and outsiders on this subject can go wrong in two familiar directions. They can treat the place as exotic, a backdrop for horror, or they can be so anxious about judging that they let the violence pass as custom. The safeguard in both cases is to give time to people inside the society who are living with the problem, and here that is where the film looks. The women in hiding are speaking about their own families, not about someone else's culture. Their testimony carries a weight no visiting filmmaker could supply.

Counting what is not counted

Any honest account of honour killings runs into a problem of numbers. The figure quoted most often comes from a UNFPA estimate in 2000, which put such killings at as many as 5,000 a year worldwide. Researchers who study the subject stress that nobody knows the true number. Many of these deaths are recorded as suicides or accidents. Some are never recorded at all.

That uncertainty should shape how the film is watched and discussed. Documentaries about violence often reach for one large figure to give a single story weight, and an estimate repeated often enough starts to sound like a census. Crimes of Honour works at the scale of individual lives, which is where the evidence is firmest.

Viewers who want a bigger picture should hold the 5,000 figure loosely. The gap it papers over is itself part of the story. A death written down as an accident is a death nobody has to answer for.

The single-faith trap

Because it was filmed in Jordan and the West Bank, Crimes of Honour can be misread as a regional report, a story about somewhere else. That reading was always lazy. The years since have made it impossible. Honour-based violence has been documented in many communities, across several faiths and in many parts of the world, including Canada, the United States and Britain.

Critics have warned for a long time against films that frame this violence as one religion's problem. The objection is practical as much as polite. A film that ties the killings to a single faith invites its audience to treat every family of that faith as a suspect. It also lets everyone else relax, as though the habit of controlling women through shame lived only in other people's houses.

The more useful documentaries keep their attention on the mechanism. A family decides that a woman's life weighs less than its reputation; some people go along with it, and a few refuse. Saywell's film makes room for that refusal, and the choice has aged well.

Even the vocabulary is contested. Many advocates now write "so-called honour killing", or prefer "honour-based violence", so as not to lend the killers' own word any dignity. The longer phrase is clumsy, and it is meant to be. It keeps a reader from forgetting whose idea of honour is at stake, and what it costs the women it is measured against.

How the subject has been filmed since

Saywell came back to the subject a decade later, and other filmmakers have taken it up in their own ways. Three films make a useful sequence for anyone studying how documentary has approached it.

The sequence runs from far away to close at hand, and from many voices toward one. In the Name of the Family brought the subject into North American cities and suburbs, with cases a Canadian or American audience could not file under foreign news. Khan's film narrows further, to a single young woman in London.

Each narrowing is a decision about dignity. The more closely a film stays with one named woman, the harder it becomes for an audience to turn her into a symbol of something. That is the direction the best work on this subject has taken, and Crimes of Honour, with its handful of carefully chosen witnesses, already pointed that way.

For anyone planning to show these films in this country, the companion viewing guide to honour-based violence in Canada covers the Canadian cases and the practical side of a careful screening.

Watching it now

Twenty-seven years on, the film's value lies less in news than in method. It shows one sound way into a dangerous subject. Listen to the people at risk. Hear the perpetrator out without adopting his terms. Give real time to the people doing the protecting.

The questions it raises about consent, and about what a crew owes people who are still in danger after the cameras leave, have not gone away. They are the subject of our essay on consent, safety and anonymity when filming survivors, and they apply with particular force to the women in hiding here. Anyone watching for the first time might also keep our notes on watching a documentary critically close by: who is speaking, who chose them, and what the film needed from each of them.

If you programme it, put Husseini's book on the table by the door. Then give the last stretch of the discussion to the women who protect, not to the man who killed. He has already had his say on screen. The audience should go home thinking about the people who keep a door bolted from the inside for someone else's daughter.