Global Statistics: Muslim Women Are The Safest

Anti-Femicide march

Islam rightly boasts of granting women many rights a lot of which were granted to non Muslim women just in the last century, millions of women across the globe are still yet to gain these rights. These rights include widowhood rights, marriage rights, inheritance rights and a host of others.

However, Islamophobes always want to kill our joy by bringing up the topic, 'honour killing', and placing it right at the door step of Islam.

To begin with, what is Honour Killing?

According to the McMillan Advanced Learners dictionary, honour killing is "the murder of a woman by a male relative because he believes that she has damaged the family's image".

Is it true that hundreds if not thousands of Muslim women and girls have been killed by their male relatives in the name of preserving the family's honour?

Well, from available data, this is true.

But the problem is, when you talk about women been victims of honour killings, it is believed that you are out to protect the lives of women. It means you hate it when women get killed. If that's the case then, your problem should be 'Femicide' and not honour killing. The killing of women happens under different circumstances hence, they carry different names. 

Honour killing, matricide, sororicide, uxoricide and passion killing all come under the banner of femicide. 

Why then do Islamophobes hammer on honour killing and hardly ever mention femicide?

What is Femicide?

Femicide or feminicide is a sex-based hate crime term, broadly defined as "the intentional killing of females (women or girls) because they are females".

Let's look at some statistics on femicide. Every year 66,000 women are violently killed globally. 50% of these killings take place in Latin America. Of the countries with the 25 highest femicide rates, El Salvador ranks number one. The last time I checked, Latin America is not a strong hold of Islam.

According to A Gender Analysis of Violent Deaths, a report published in 2016 by the Small Arms Survey, among the top 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world, 14 are from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Below is a chart to summarize this problem

Also included in the top 25 are seven European countries, two Asian countries, and one African country, South Africa.

From the list of the top 25 countries, we see that there isn't a single Arab country, neither is there on the list a single country that is often mentioned whenever honour killing is the topic of discussion. 

No Pakistan, no Bangladesh and no Afghanistan. 

In a nutshell, the countries that rank high in honour killings are too inferior to be on the femicide list. There is only one Muslim dominated country on the list; Kazakhstan. The last time I checked, Kazakhstan does not have Islam as state religion, it is a devoutly secular and West-cultured state.

Looking closer, in the United States of America, femicide accounts for the deaths of four women daily. It is the leading cause of death for African American women ages 15–24 and of on-the-job death for women.

In Colombia (a Latin American country), one woman is killed every two days. In 2014, 871 Colombian women died from acid attacks alone. Still on Colombia, in the first ten months of 2015, 671 women were killed.

It is obvious that Islamophobes make headlines of honour killing cases in the Muslim world to divert attention from femicide; a crime of which their cultures are most guilty.

Femicide: A Greater Threat to Women Than Honour Killings