'Honour Killings' in Pakistan and Compliance of ... - Aurat Foundation

5. Implementation of the Criminal Law
(Amendment) Act 2004
After 5 years of the legislation having been passed, the question arises as
to how effective it has been. With this in mind, the pilot study focusses on
two main questions: to investigate how many cases of honour killings
were being reported to the police and being registered across the country;
and how the courts were responding to cases of honour killings since the
law was passed.
5.1 Registered Cases of Honour Killings
It is extremely difficult to collect accurate data on the actual number of
honour killings across Pakistan. Large numbers go unreported; others are
categorised under other heads and are missed. This is evidenced by the
fact that even organisations and bodies that do try to collect data on
violence against women, including honour killings, are on many
occasions unable to match even their own data!
The media has played a fundamental role in data collection. According to
a 2009 report in the European Journal of Public Health, newspaper
reports are a good source of surveillance when information is limited 41 .
Aurat Foundation’s Violence Against Women Policy and Data
Monitoring Project (PDM) 42 has done tremendous work towards
gathering data on violence against women since 2008-10, as evidenced
below.
41 ‘The epidemiological patterns of honour killing of women in Pakistan’, Muazzam
Nasrullah 1,2,3, Sobia Haqqi 4, Kristin J. Cummings, European Journal of Public Health,
Vol. 19, No. 2, 193–197
42 Aurat Foundation has published 3 annual reports on statistics of violence against
women for 2008 and 2010
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