Honor suicides

Source:Women told: 'You have dishonoured your family, please kill yourself' by Ramita Navai for The Independent.

This is one of the saddest truths that we have to think about when we use international pressure as our tool for social change. Yes, women's groups have achieved victory when they imposed mandatory life sentence to honor crimes... but since not enough has been done to change mentalities, parts of the populations have simply moved from killing the woman (according to this same articles there were more than 200 crimes per year) to suiciding the woman.

And sadly, this is even worse, there is virtually no way of proving it. So instead of having the killer going to jail for a limited amount of time, he doesn't go to jail at all!

Now I am not saying that the Turkish groups didn't do enough, or that we should never use international pressure. No, they did a great job and Turkey is a really big country with various problems and a heterogeneous population. Sometimes even the best intentions are not enough, this just means they still have a lot of work to do.