Honour, violence and masculinity are closely linked in traditional criminology, and are combined with an ethnic profile of the offender. This article discusses the conclusion of these assumptions as ethnocentric, but also as a simplification of the gendered idea of honour. Beliefs about honour, which are reduced to the male gender, and understood as conductive to crime, disregard insights regarding violent females, and awareness about the significance of honour in marginalized groups. Furthermore, this contribution discusses the supplementary value of a critical gender perspective, for discussion in criminology about honour and crime.

Honour-based violence (HBV) is a tight knot of conflict, gender and ethnicity. It is also the sensational subject of many bestselling books, in which mostly female victims of HBV tell their life stories. Researchers of feminism and multiculturalism argue that migrant women are often presented as passive victims, and migrant men as violent perpetrators. In our first article for PROCES on this subject, we analysed ten (auto)biographies of female victims of HBV, using theoretical insights on stigmatization. After the publication of this article, we continued to collect these true life stories. In our current article, we analyse two new aspects: how do these stories find their way to the Internet, and are there any HBV stories by male authors? Do stories by male authors shed a different light on honour conflicts and on stereotypes of culture and gender?

Images can honour and dishonour people. But they only do so when that specific meaning is assigned to the image. This article shows that the meaning of images is dynamic and subjective in nature, using three analytical dimensions: content, format and context. These three dimensions are explored in two series of images: painted portraits of deceased American soldiers and photographs of posters of Palestinian suicide bombers. Whether these images are honouring or dishonouring the people portrayed depends on the viewer who constructs their meaning. This not only gives the creator and distributor a (moral) responsibility, but the viewer as well.

Honour-related emotions such as shame, guilt, anger, distrust and pride play a critical role in regulating the response to a traumatic event and the severity of posttraumatic stress symptoms. Crimes with the intent to cause harm to a person include, to a greater or lesser extent, a component to overpower and humiliate. Such traumatic experiences can, especially in more collectivist cultures, lead to a complex mix of posttraumatic guilt and shame. In order to restore honour, posttraumatic shame or guilt can lead to violence. Together with posttraumatic stress symptoms such as flashbacks and hyperarousal it may even lead to excessive violence.

In the Netherlands honour based violence is often associated with cases that take place in a Turkish context. But honour codes can be found all over the world. In order to develop a more profound understanding of honour based violence it is therefore important to study this phenomenon in different social and cultural circumstances. In this contribution attention is paid towards the experiences of young men from Curaçao that live on the fringes of Dutch society. How do they perceive honour and the relationship with the use of violence?

‘Pride’ and ‘honour’ are two concepts that are closely related and in the context of South Africa, are often based on a history of violent battles between various groups in society. VU University Amsterdam has lifelong relations with the historically Afrikaner universities in South Africa. During the Apartheid years the Afrikaner universities scientifically legitimized many of the apartheid policies and practices. In that sense VU University Amsterdam, through its relations to South African counterparts, may be considered complicit with the policies and practices of the Apartheid regime. Consequently, there seems little reason for pride and honour, but rather shame about having sided with academic partners who have at least passively supported the regime? Starting with an explicit acknowledgement of this complicity, the oeuvre of former Archbishop Desmond Tutu may open a path of hope for VUA to contribute to mending past injustices and by, together with its South African academic partners, working towards equality and building new relations in the present South African society.