Shame, the Church and the Regulation of Female Sexuality by Clough Miryam;

Author:Clough, Miryam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

Shameful honour

Where family honour is linked to female chastity, women are punished for sexual transgressions and for being the victims of male sexual violence. For many women this punishment is enacted through blame, social stigma and shame. For others it manifests in appalling physical violence and loss of life.6 Despite global scrutiny, public floggings, stoning and honour-based killings continue to be perpetrated against girls and women who have been sexually violated.7 During the Iraq War, Iraqi women prisoners who were sexually abused or humiliated by their British and American captors were unable to return to their families for fear of similar reprisal because of the shame they would bring (Harding 2004). In the UK, young women have been killed by family members for making lifestyle choices that are simply congruent with the Western world they have grown up in.8 In each case the perceived source of shame, the woman, is scapegoated to preserve the honour of the family, which often experiences intense pressure from their immediate community. In cases of sexual violence, the shame which should belong to the male perpetrator of abuse and the patriarchal culture that facilitates it is displaced, and the innocent female victim is scapegoated to preserve male honour and deflect male anxiety.

Honour-based violence has been a feature of many societies in many historical periods. The more specific cultural narrative constructs that underpin the honour-based violation of women in predominantly Muslim and Sikh cultures and communities in the modern world are outside the remit of this volume. The incarceration of women in Magdalen laundries was a different sort of violence; however, it was clearly located in a shame-honour-based familial and social framework. Many of the girls and women, including those who were victims of rape or incest, were sent to the laundries by their families, who sought to avoid their own public humiliation and shame. As Inglis (2003, 150–166) argues, the moral compass of Joanne Hayes, her family and their community was embedded in the traditional, gender-based shame-honour codes that were still operating in Ireland during the late twentieth century, particularly in rural areas. The Hayes family was subjected to ritual shaming and humiliation during the investigation of a brutal infanticide that was seen to compromise the honour of the people of Kerry, and the direction the case took was compounded by efforts to preserve the honour of the police (Inglis 2003, 165–166).9

In his essay on prostitution in South Africa, Prostitution in the Context of Christianity, Domeris (1996) locates the shaming of women (specifically women who work as prostitutes) in the honour and purity codes of the dominantly patriarchal ancient Mediterranean world and in Christian teaching. He observes that in the ancient Mediterranean, shame, which he describes as a ‘social stigma’, was the result of the absence of purity and was ‘designed to exacerbate the powerlessness of the woman’ (section 2). He goes on to explain that the association of women with evil and the underworld, expressed, for example, in the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box

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