"According to government statistics, 30% of women who are murdered are killed by their spouses."
google's not helping me on this. i'd be very surprised if nobody's written any papers on this, even if it's sort of taboo - and is going to especially be taboo amongst the kind of people who are going to study this.
http://brandongaille.com/27-intriguing-crimes-of-passion-statistics/
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"According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 30 percent of all female murder victims were killed by their spouses. Another 18.3 percent were killed by ex-spouses."
that's nearly half...
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/why-do-we-kill2.htm
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/4/23/study-us-female-murder-rate-high/
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from this page, i can calculate that the murder rate for women in the united states was about 1.02/100000 in 2011.
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4863
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google tells me directly that the population of the united states was 312 million in 2011.
that suggests that there were around 3182 female homicides in the united states in 2011; the math works out to 1537 being killed by a partner or ex-partner, and while it may be a leap of logic to suggest that most were equivalent to "honour killings" it's a reasonable one.
so, let's go with 1500 honour killings in the united states in 2011. this calculation has nothing to do with ethnicity.
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the population of MENA is 381 million - roughly comparable. this excludes pakistan and india, where the population both gets much bigger and the problem is much worse. but, let's try and compare like with like as best we can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MENA
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"(In the mena region) With the exception of Iran, laws which allow for ‘honour’ killing are not derived from Islamic precepts, but from the penal codes of the Napoleonic Empire which legislated for crimes of ‘passion.’"
intriguing. no numbers, though.
http://hbv-awareness.com/regions/
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i can't find a number for mena, specifically, and i don't think that bringing india into the discussion is conceptually fair (especially considering that a lot of them occur in india by non-muslims).
truth is i'm hungry.
but, most people wouldn't have pulled out a number like 1500, which is no doubt an underestimate - it doesn't include daughters killed by their fathers or other relatives. that's just women killed by partners and ex-partners.