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Honor-Related Abuse
aka: Honor Killing

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Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee;
And, with thy shame, thy father's sorrow die!
Titus, Titus Andronicus

A character's family mistreats them, to restore their Family Honor.

This is not about personal honor, that accrued by an individual by their own actions or accomplishments. It's held by the entire family and determines their social standing and how they are regarded and treated by other members of society. Someone who tarnishes or besmirches the family's honor must be punished by the family, lest they lose even more honor for letting them off the hook.

The trope covers a wide spectrum of punishments, from relatively short-term humiliation to disownment all the way to "honor killings" where the victim's family murders them.

While this trope is usually directed against female characters, and sometimes others who aided or participated in the dishonorable behavior, it can also be directed at males. The chief differences are what is regarded as dishonorable behavior; for male characters, cowardice, dishonesty, adultery, and homosexuality are the most common reasons, while for females, the list is much longer, including disobedience or rebellion, any sort of sexual 'misbehavior', and even being raped.

While it's fairly typical of societies like pre-19th/20th century Europe and tribe- and clan-based cultures, works which treat it as acceptable, or even expected, tend to create Values Dissonance for modern day audiences.

Related to Murder in the Family and Family Honor.

Contrast:

  • Rape and Revenge, where a rape victim (and/or their family) visit retribution on the rapist, rather than on the victim.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge, where the retribution is extended to anyone who had any sort of connection to the dishonorable action, however tenuous.

Often occurs along with:

  • Appeal to Force
  • Appeal to Tradition: Often, this state of affairs is justified by saying that it's how things have always been done.
  • The refusal to go through with an Arranged Marriage (eg. a Child Marriage Veto, or someone who'd rather Marry for Love instead)
  • Blaming the Victim: Happens quite a lot in cases like this, with those who were sexually victimized being blamed for it.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: killing, disowning, injuring, etc. "wayward" or "unruly" family members is seen as being for the greater good of the family vis a vis their public image.
  • Bury Your Gays, if the dishonor is homosexuality.
  • Consummation Counterfeit, which is usually performed in an attempt to prevent this.
  • Contractual Purity
  • Culture Justifies Anything
  • Cure Your Gays, for attempts to "fix" the dishonor of homosexuality.
  • Death by Woman Scorned, when the dishonor is being cuckolded and the solution is murder (of the unfaithful spouse and/or their lover).
  • Defiled Forever, when the dishonor is that the family member was raped, or simply engaged in illicit sex (or is rumored to have done so).
  • Dirty Coward, if the family honor is closely tied to military service or behavior in battle. In this case, the victim is virtually always male, and the punishment is more likely to be psychological, financial, or social, rather than physical.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: It doesn't matters how small the slight is from a rational point of view (ex. losing your spot in a line), it still is a besmirch on your honor and must be punished as harshly as possible (ex. shoot the other guy).
  • Divorce Requires Death, if the dishonor is the seeking of a divorce or the breaking off of an engagement.
  • Entitled to Have You/If I Can't Have You…, if the dishonor is rejecting or leaving a romantic or sexual relationship.
  • Feuding Families, if an outsider (spouse, lover, accomplice) is included in the retribution and their family responds in kind.
  • Homophobic Hate Crime, if the dishonor is homosexuality.
  • Honor Before Reason
  • I Have No Son!, if the punishment is being cast out of the family altogether.
  • Lobotomy, when arranged to keep a willful relative under control.
  • Locked Away in a Monastery, if the punishment is lifelong enforced withdrawal from society.
  • Mad Woman In The Attic, if the dishonor is a family member being mentally ill, disabled, etc.
  • Malicious Slander: If the dishonor (and reaction to it) is based on rumors, not facts, or when it's exploited to get rid of a "troublesome" family member.
  • Maligned Mixed Marriage, if the dishonor is a relationship with someone of another ethnicity.
  • Men Act, Women Are: In societies where this is common, the honor of women and children is held as a reflection of the men in their lives. A woman or child's honor can only decrease (barring exceptional cicumstances), while a man's honor can either increase or decrease depending on his actions. (Where girls and women are concerned, a big part of this boils down to their virginity before marriage and chastity during and after it.) Killing or banishing a "wayward" woman or child in a setting like this may be seen as a way for a man to restore his honor and Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
  • Moral Event Horizon, most probably declared as such by third parties who are horrified at the abuse and don't think honor is worth that much violence and/or have an extremely different (and more valid) definition of "honor".
  • My Girl Is Not a Slut, if the dishonor is that a girl or woman has engaged in illicit sex, or is rumored to have done so.
  • Never Suicide, if alleging that the victim committed suicide is used to cover up her murder.
  • No Woman's Land: Places where this kind of abuse occurs regularly are generally not nice places to live if you're female.
  • Once Done, Never Forgotten: Family honor (and shame) is carried through generations, and nearby communities talk, increasing motivation to keep everyone in line (and thus prevent shame), or remove shame as quickly as possible, through any means possible. (Even if that means injuring/killing/disowning/locking away one's own family members.)
  • Parental Marriage Veto, if the child defies the parents and marries anyway.
  • Period Piece, when the work is set in an era or location that relied heavily on the concept of Family Honor
  • Property of Love, if the dishonor is that a man's wife has cheated on him, or his daughter has had illicit sex, and therefore he's seen as less of a man because he can't control her.
  • Rape Portrayed as Redemption, if the punishment is rape
  • Rejection Ritual
  • Shotgun Wedding, if the punishment is to be forced into marriage to one's paramour or rapist, or if a wedding is held to prevent being killed
  • Slave to PR: It's the reputation of the family and/or its members that counts. Harming or killing family members who pose a threat to that reputation is seen as protecting the family.
  • Slut-Shaming, if the dishonor was the girl or woman having any kind of sexual relations, willing or not, or even just being rumored to have done so.
  • Symbolic Mutilation or a Mark of Shame may be used as a punishment.
  • Values Dissonance: Hoooooooooooo boy. Abuse related to Family Honor dredges up a hell of a lot of this, particularly for Western audiences.
  • You Can't Go Home Again, if the punishment is being banished or ostracized, or if someone is trying to escape punishment from their family.
  • Your Mom, if the dishonor is the suggestion that a man's mother is, in fact, a sexual being and/or engaged in illicit sex.

No Real Life Examples, Please! Just let The Other Wiki provide the facts.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Imokusa Reijou Desu Ga Akuyaku Reisoku Wo Tasuketara Kiniiraremashita has as a central plot point that the protagonist Agnes Evantail, (renamed Agnes Hazelnut after marriage), has suffered this for as long as she could walk and talk. Her mother is emotionally abusive, constantly berating her for "failing" to be a Brainless Beauty and getting herself married to a man approved of by the family matriarch, Agnes' own father. Her father does all that and punches her in the face "for defiance" because the reason for Agnes's failures is that her family is obsessed with ancient traditions, including clothing that is 100 years out of date, and outlawed, which causes her to look like a clown to her peers, getting her ridiculed, and even after they banish her for being ordered by royal decree to marry a "criminal" duke, whose name was dragged through the mud with easily disproved false accusations, the younger brother goes out of his way to challenge her as a disgrace, and when she very politely asks said brother to leave her alone, as she's already been disowned, the father gets enraged and tries to punch her in the face, immediately, right in front of the second prince and actually protests, loudly, resisting to the very end when he's stopped by Agnes's husband, getting wrestled to the ground in self-defense, and still doesn't see why he's in the wrong when the second prince holds him to task and tells him that the "criminal duke" is innocent, and it's the Evantail family that are criminals.
  • Naruto: The Hyuuga clan's use of the Caged Bird seal borders on this. It's a seal placed on the foreheads of the Branch House members, and it can be activated by any Main House member with a hand seal, causing them a horrible pain while it destroys their brain cells. We see Hiashi Hyuuga (Hinata's father) using it on his brother Hizashi for what he perceived as "killing intent", and (in an anime-only episode) on Neji for going overboard during a sparring session with Hinata. The Hyuga Elder justifies this as their way to keep their power protected and secret, since it has the secondary effect of sealing away the clan's kekkei genkai, the Byakugan, upon the bearer's death.
  • Ranma ½: Ranma Saotome's mother, Nodoka, is introduced to the series fanatically obsessed with a contract that Genma made before he took Ranma away at the age of roughly 5 or 6, which declares that Ranma must become a "man among men" or else he and his father will have to commit seppuku. This would be abusive enough, especially when one takes into account the fact Ranma was far too young to legally understand what he was "signing" and the fact the contract is written up as (paraphrasing, and being generous) "I will become manly or commit seppuku". But Nodoka is so obsessed with it that she carries a sharp-bladed sword wherever she goes, just in case she encounters Ranma and must immediately put him to death. This, and the times she either almost forces Ranma to go through with it (before moving in with the Tendos) or threatens Ranma and Genma into going along with her wishes by mentioning it (afterwards), is played for laughs.

    Comic Books 
  • According to Batman/Scarecrow Year One, Jonathan Crane's mother was kicked out of the house as soon as she gave birth to her son due to being conceived out of wedlock (and as a teenager no less) and her family being extremely religious (her grandmother even going so far as to call her a "whore"). And unfortunately, the abuse would extend to poor Jonathan throughout his childhood due to being seen as a product of "sin" in Granny Keeny's eyes, basically punishing him for being alive.
  • In Supreme Power, in one issue, the Squadron Supreme are sent on a mission into an unnamed Middle Eastern country, where team member Inertia encounters a native girl and is told the girl's mother and sisters were stoned to death by her father and other male relatives for the "crime" of being raped by invading soldiers. Due to Inertia's Dark and Troubled Past involving a religiously ultraconservative father who abused and ultimately murdered her mother and blamed her for being gang-raped, she doesn't take this well. She proceeds to locate the girl's male kinsfolk and bury them up to their necks in the sand before giving her a length of torn-off metal fence as a makeshift club. As she walks away, echoing sound effects make it clear that the girl is gleefully bashing her relatives to death.

    Fan Works 
  • In First Try Series, pre-massacre Uchiha would have Uchiha who married outside of Konoha or had illegitimate children killed so the Sharingan would not spread outside of Konoha or out of Uchiha supervision. Itachi outright says this is the reason why there is no other Uchiha (to his knowledge) left besides him and Sasuke. This is the elder Tobi's motive for kidnapping Sasuke's children, because the Uchiha killed his family because he married a woman from a different village.
  • In The Prayer Warriors, Jerry has his wife Mary executed by being thrown off a tower, stoned to death, and beheaded upon merely hearing that Percy Jackson impregnated her. Inexplicably, Mary survives and is forgiven by Jerry.
  • With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: The cult God's Will First is willing to rape their own family members for not following their interpretation of Christianity. Jughead's uncle brought him in for being asexual, and Gideon Grey's dad joined in on "punishing" him for being gay and disowned him afterwards.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Av The Hunt: In this Turkish film, Ayse leaves her husband for another man. Her husband, his brothers, and her father all decide that she must die, and she goes on the run.
    Father: It is not for you to change our traditions, you whore.
  • In the movie Crossing Over, a Middle Eastern man murders his sister and her lover, incensed at her refusal to end her affair with a man who is not only married but Mexican.
  • Chozen Toguchi of The Karate Kid Part II accuses Daniel LaRusso of dishonoring him, to the point of threatening to end his life. It's extremely fortunate that Sato managed to set him on the right path and help him regain his honor after the events of the film, and Daniel and Chozen become close friends in Cobra Kai.
  • The Magdalene Sisters:
    • Rose became pregnant out of wedlock, so her family pressure her to adopt the child out and then go to the laundry to atone for her 'sins'.
    • Margaret is raped by a cousin at a family wedding. Her father views her as Defiled Forever and has her imprisoned in the laundry.
    • Una's reasons for being there in the first place aren't stated, but she escapes and is dragged back there by her father. He tells her she brought shame on her family and disowns her for it.
  • The TV movie Murdered By My Father, in which the titular event happens when a young girl gets a boyfriend and tries to reject the arranged marriage her father had planned for her. The father is also subjected to this trope since the groom's family have him beaten up when they find out.
  • The movie Not Without My Daughter (as well as the book it's based on) tells the story of a failed marriage and a custody battle as entirely a matter of Honor-Related Abuse. The characters start out as an American family, although the husband is of Iranian descent. They are happy with each other until they visit Iran, where the husband's ultra-conservative (even by Iranian standards) family can start putting much more pressure on him to conform to their values than they could long-distance; he ends up taking on the role they push on him as protector of the family honor, and he starts battering his wife and brainwashing his daughter (though he is portrayed as being a victim as well as a perpetrator, since his drastic change in attitude is clearly caused by his family's manipulation and brainwashing). The mother would be allowed to go back to America since she's a US citizen, but she would have to leave her daughter behind (hence the film's title); because the daughter has been given Iranian citizenship (without the mother's consent), the mother can't take her out of the country through a legal checkpoint without the father's permission, which he would never give, so the only way for the mother to get out with her daughter is for them to be smuggled. Eventually, they manage to flee the country and return home to the USA.
  • In The Stoning of Soraya M., this is the excuse for the titular stoning; The husband wants to spend more time with his mistress and avoid the cost of a divorce, so he first sends his wife to do household chores for a male widow and then accuses her of adultery. They eventually bully the widower to falsely testify against her and force Soraya's father and children to participate in the stoning.
  • In the German film When We Leave, a young woman leaves her abusive husband in Turkey to return to her family in Germany. Although basically sympathetic to the abuse she has endured, they are ashamed of her for leaving her husband and supposedly bringing shame onto her family — their friends shun them and her younger sister's fiance nearly ends their relationship until the father offers the other family a large sum of money. When the young woman flees the family apartment after realizing that they are planning to kidnap her son and send him back to his father, they shun her outright and her brother begins stalking and harassing her, culminating in him trying to stab her (after her younger brother can't bring himself to shoot her) and accidentally killing her son, who she was holding in her arms at the time. Ironically, despite having no remorse about trying to kill his own sister, he is horrified at having killed his nephew.
  • When Darkness Falls: Leyla's family does that to her sister Nina when they think that she had sexual contact with several men. Her father punches her and almost the whole family tries to force her to suicide. This ends in the family killing Nina by staging her suicide on a high-speed street in Germany.

    Literature 
  • In Gabriel García Márquez's novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Angela Vicario's husband turns her away and her mother beats her when they realize that she isn't a virgin. The "Death" mentioned in the title is that of Angela's alleged lover, whom her family murders in order to restore their lost honor.
  • The Empire trilogy: At least one character "honor kills" his entire family prior to such an act. Many deaths are arranged so that rivals can "gain in honor." The majority of people who have the misfortune of being slaves are treated as poorly as possible so that their "debts" may be paid and they can go honorably to death and to their next life. In fact, much of the trilogy is just made of this trope.
  • Ariane, the heroine of the medieval Romance Novel Enchanted, is forced into an Arranged Marriage by her father, who considers her Defiled Forever after her rape (even worse, he doesn't believe she was raped and that it's she who seduced her assailant). Either way, her original intended wants nothing more to do with her and so he forces her into another marriage so that he can look like a father sending his daughter off with her husband rather than exiling her.
  • Flowers in the Attic, the book and film. A widow with children tries to restore connections with her wealthy family, but she was estranged due to Brother–Sister Incest. After she takes enough punishment to satisfy their demands for penance, she abandons her imprisoned children to their continued abuse.
  • Gone with the Wind. Rhett Butler is not "received" in his hometown of Charleston (not that he "gives a damn", so to speak) because he refused to marry a girl he'd been alone with at night, thus compromising her reputation. She herself is said to have been "ruined" by the scandal.
  • In Iron Widow, Huaxian girls are drowned in pig-pens if they ever have premarital sex or get raped, or even if they're suspected of having done so. Zetian's abusive family constantly threatened her with this growing up, so even after she escapes them it takes a lot of trust and time before she can act on her sexual desires without panicking.
  • Matteo Falcone by Prosper Mérimée: a child tells the location of an escaped prisoner after the man made him swear that he would not tell. The prisoner was captured and the child was praised by everybody (including the kid's uncle, the police commissioner) for such a heroic action... everybody except the kid's father, that is, who took the fact that the kid broke his promise as an act besmirching the family honor (he explicitly calls the act "treason"), and so takes the kid deep into the woods and blows his head off with a shotgun.
  • The Swedish book Mordet pÃ¥ Fadime (The murder of Fadime) revolves around this, especially the case that made "honor killings" a well-known concept in Sweden.
  • Virginius and Virginia in Livy, The Romance Of The Rose and The Canterbury Tales. In Livy, at least, there is a strong implication that Virginius and Virginia herself regarded this as a Mercy Killing saving her from a Fate Worse than Death.
  • Sing the Four Quarters leans on Eternal Sexual Freedom, but Annice's brother King Theron bans her on pain of death from having children when she refuses to submit to a political marriage to a prince of neighboring Cemandia. In a subversion, Theron later views this as a mistake born of youthful inexperience, and pursues a very pregnant Annice all the way out to the edge of the realm to apologize.
  • Victarion Greyjoy in A Song of Ice and Fire is haunted by the memory of killing his wife according to this trope after his brother Euron slept with her. Despite personally blaming Euron for what happened (and suspecting that he actually raped her), the honour code of Ironborn culture demanded that she die at her husband's hand. The event sparked a lifelong Cain and Abel relationship and led to Euron being banished.
  • In To Kill a Mockingbird, after catching his daughter trying to seduce their African-American neighbor Tom Robinson, Bob Ewell beats the shit out of her and forces her to testify that Tom Robinson raped her.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Frank's subplot in one episode of Blue Bloods concerned a Turkish violinist on a US tour seeking political asylum due to her having dated an American during the tour: she believed she would be in danger of an honor killing if she returned home. The State Department vetoes it for political reasons, so Frank works his contacts and gets the New York Philharmonic to hire her, and State agrees to get her a work visa.
  • In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tara's family is like this. They abuse her emotionally and lie to her to make her hate herself, fooling her to believe that she is less than human. When she breaks free to make a life of her own, they start threatening to move on to physical abuse, and would most likely have made good on their threats if it wasn't for almost the entire cast closing ranks around her and telling them that they would have to go through them to get to her. Except Spike. Spike does help, in his own unique fashion: he hits Tara in the face. Since it triggers his Morality Chip, thus proving she's entirely human, it does help her...by hurting her. And him.
  • Subverted in The Closer two-parter "Living Proof". A scuffle between two Albanian men in a mall ends with the older one dead, the younger one claiming he only killed in self-defense (reasonable enough, as the older man had pulled out the knife in the first place). He claimed that the old man was his father, who had disowned him for marrying a Christian. Then the dead man's daughters turn up dead, and the son suggests that his father had snapped and gone on a belated honor-killing spree against his family (the daughters for being raped by Serbian forces during the Albanian genocide, the son for failing to protect them and surviving by hiding). In fact, the "son" was one of the murdering Serbian soldiers, pulling a Dead Person Impersonation using the name of one of his victims to escape trial for war crimes. Unfortunately for him, his stolen identity's father met him by chance, and the man tried to kill the entire Albanian family so they couldn't out him as a war criminal.
  • In the CSI: Miami episode "Dishonor", a father attempts this via burning his daughter alive after she falls in love and changes her mind about an Arranged Marriage, only to end up being burned alive himself when his wife finds out.
  • Subverted in Farscape: up until the episode "Mental As Anything," D'Argo's Dark and Troubled Past involved his wife, Lo'Laan, being murdered by her brother, Macton — apparently for marrying a non-Sebacean. However, when D'Argo finally catches up with Macton, it turns out that the "honour-killing" was accidental: the two of them had been arguing about his Fantastic Racism against his brother-in-law, and Lo'Laan had drawn a knife on Macton — only for him to instinctively deflect it back on her. Macton's real crime was making it look as though D'Argo had done it in a fit of Hyper Rage.
  • Sometimes referenced on Goodness Gracious Me. One example was a mock advertisement for the fire-proof "Asbestos Sari", designed to prevent the wearer meeting an untimely death in a "kitchen accident" (this is sometimes used as a euphemism for women being killed over dowry disputes, sometimes by being burned alive.)
  • A lighter example shows up in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys when the titular demigod travels to the land of the Vikings. Herc happens upon an inn where he finds a Norsewoman held up in stocks with her braided pigtails stretched out and pinned to the wood as a pair of drunken men take turns lobbing hatchets at her. Naturally, Hercules intervenes, beating up the two drunks and freeing the woman, only to be surprised when she slaps him in the face and proceeds to tend to the two men. As Herc leaves, Baldur informs him the two men were her brother and husband, who were trying to clear her name of adultery by lopping off her pigtails (had they done so before falling into a stupor, it meant she was innocent of the accusation). Of course, Hercules points out the barbarity of such a trial, to which Baldur does explain this is a barbaric land. Comes back later when the now short-haired woman points out Herc to be Father and other brothers, declaring he'd tried to impugn her honor by interrupting the test.
  • A season eight episode of House has him rant about the concept of honor, including some anger-tinged snark about "killing your daughter because she had the audacity to get raped".
  • One episode of the historical miniseries The Kennedys depicts Rosemary Kennedy's lobotomy, which her father arranged because she was a "problem child." The really disturbing part is that this actually happened.
  • Basically the whole plot of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit season two episode "Honor." A woman is brutally killed, and it turns out it was related to her family's disapproval of her boyfriend. Her mother finally steps up and admits what she saw and...well, you try getting those final images out of your head. Her corpse is found in the bedroom of her home, her husband having slashed her throat and fled back to Afghanistan before the police could catch him, with his characterization of the episode making it clear that he won't lose a moment of sleep over having murdered his supposed love and his own child.
    • In a later episode, ADA Casey Novak is brutally attacked by the brother of a young Muslim woman who was raped. His reason? He feels that Casey brought dishonor upon the family because her investigation and trial let it be known that his sister isn't a virgin anymore and is therefore unsuitable for marriage, and that by attacking Casey, he has restored his family's reputation.
  • One episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent involved a Muslim girl who was killed by her brother because she refused an arranged marriage, wanting instead to marry her non-Muslim boyfriend, and because she was having premarital sex with said boyfriend. The final straw was when she became pregnant, as this would have made it plain for the world to see that she was not a virgin once she started showing.
  • A first-season episode of Madam Secretary sees a delicate negotiation with Iran imperiled over the Iranian's scheduled stoning of a gay man. Elizabeth sympathizes but can't place a single life above the national interests.
  • The Murders: "Queen of Hearts" has the father of the victim be revealed to have previously been acquitted on a conspiracy to commit murder charge in India because he was alleged to have aided in a relative's murder for running away from the marriage the family arranged. As his own son was with a white girl in Canada after they immigrated, at first the police think he may have done the same thing. However, it turns out to be a red herring, since he was a cop while in India and attempting to help his relative, with him being exonerated due to his innocence.
  • Mystery Road: In the second season, the murder of Zoe and her boyfriend turns out to be a case of this. She had previously been since childhood marked out for an Arranged Marriage by the traditionalists in her Australian Aboriginal community. Her fiance was a laid-back type who was perfectly happy to let her break off the engagement since she'd found someone else, but the traditionalist and authoritarian elder who had arranged the marriage was outraged and killed her and her new lover.
  • In New Amsterdam (2008), the episode "Honor" has an Indian rape victim being killed by her family because she was no longer a virgin. The flashbacks to the immortal's past also revealed that the protagonist had previously held the same notion that a woman who loses her virginity is Defiled Forever until he discovers that she had in fact been raped.
  • Referenced in an episode of NUMB3RS involving the murder of an Iraqi woman. The FBI initially speculates that it could be an honor killing, either because the victim had begun speaking publicly about having been raped as a teenager or because she is revealed to have secretly married a non-Muslim man. However, it turns out it wasn't an honor killing after all; the killing was actually on the orders of her rapist, who wanted to shut her up before she could make trouble for him.
  • A storyline on the Soap Opera Port Charles had a young Middle Eastern woman being terrorized by her brother. She had fled her country after being raped and her family responded by sending her brother to kill her in order to restore the family honor. This being a Soap Opera, a well-meaning friend quickly married her to keep her from being deported back to her country as well as to pacify her family. Unfortunately, it didn't work — the brother continued stalking her and discovered that the marriage was fake (the man already had a girlfriend) and eventually did attempt to kill her, though he was unsuccessful.
  • In an episode of Silent Witness, a Vietnamese woman was subjected to this after her arranged marriage fell through because the groom discovered she wasn't a virgin.
  • Strong Medicine. An episode has a young Pakistani woman fearing she will face this if she refuses to enter the marriage her father has arranged for her. Indeed, she is beaten to death by a cousin for being alone with a man she isn't related to.
  • In the Tales from the Crypt 3rd season episode "Yellow", a World War One general tricks his own son into going without struggle to his own execution by lying and claiming he will have the guns loaded with blanks so he can have his Death Faked for You, all to preserve his familial honor and reputation as a steadfast military family, which his inherently timid son had never been able to live up to and which resulted in his court martial for cowardice. For an added punch, his son realizes his father's true plan when he glances over and sees his father is actually making sure that every gun is loaded with real bullets.
  • Invoked and Played for Laughs in We Are Lady Parts where Lady Parts (an all-female, all-Muslim punk band) has a song called "Ain't No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister But Me".
    She stole my eyeliner (What a bitch!)
    And she's been stretching my shoes out with her
    Fucking big feet
  • In the aptly titled Without a Trace episode "Honor Bound", about the disappearance of a young Korean-American woman whose family was supposedly angry and disgusted with her for breaking away from family traditions—she'd backed out of her arranged marriage, refused to work in her family's store, and was meeting men online for BDSM encounters. It turned out that she and her would-be husband had mutually decided to call off their wedding (he was gay and would have been just as miserable as she was), and the BDSM account was a fake set up by a vengeful ex who she'd met during legitimate normal online dating. The team tells this to her brother who breaks down and admits that he killed her in a fit of rage over her supposedly immoral behavior and is now horrified to realize that his actions were unwarranted.

    Music 
  • Child Ballad 65, "Lady Maisry" is a Border ballad about a young Scottish girl who falls in love with an Englishman and becomes pregnant by him after refusing to marry any of the Scottish lords her family approved of. In response, her family has her burned alive.
  • Child Ballad 233, "Andrew Lammie", also called "Mill O'Tifty" is a Scottish ballad about a young woman named Annie, who is the daughter of the miller at Tifty. She falls in love with the titular Lammie, who is a trumpeter for the Lord of Fyvie. Lord Fyvie finds Annie attractive and tells her parents he wants to marry her, and they agree. When Annie says that she's in love with Andrew Lammie, her brother and father kill her.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, some Garou tribes carry out honor violence on kinfolk who mate with unapproved partners.
    • As the royal leaders of the Garou Nation, the Silver Fangs are obsessed with maintaining the "purity" of their bloodlines. According to the revised Silver Fang tribebook, the Silver Fangs historically killed or sterilized kinfolk who mated with partners outside of the tribe.
    • According to Kinfolk, some hardline Wendigo septs murder kinfolk who marry outside of the tribe.

    Theatre 
  • The Desert Song has a variant. The Mighty Whitey hero is left to die in the desert and loses the leadership of his band of outlaws due to refusing to fight an opponent.
  • The title character in The Duchess of Malfi is imprisoned, tormented, and ultimately murdered on the order of her brothers. Her crime? Getting married (to her steward) without their permission. (Of course, her twin brother isn't motivated strictly by family honor.)
  • Leonato gets close to this in Much Ado About Nothing when his daughter Hero is publicly denounced as a whore by her would-be groom, Claudio, at the altar. After Claudio storms out, Leonato flies into a rage about how Hero has been irrevocably stained and how awful it is that she's his only child—in some productions, he may actually hit her during this diatribe. He doesn't let up until the priest tells him to shut up and pay attention to her behavior, which is not that of a guilty woman. Even after Leonato agrees to the plan of faking her death until her name is cleared, he warns that "these hands shall tear her" if the slander turns out to be true after all.
  • The protagonist of Titus Andronicus. After his daughter Lavinia gets raped, he restores his honor by murdering the rapists — and her! Sure, she was depicted as a severe case of Defiled Forever, and if the murder had been done in a gentler way, it could have been considered a Mercy Killing to put her out of her misery, given the severe mutilation she also suffered during the attack, but the way he actually did it (at least in the movie version, and that one stays true to the original manuscript) comes off as though killing his daughter is a part of his personal revenge.

    Video Games 
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition: In a setting where Enslaved Elves are subject to Fantastic Racism by humans, elven companion Sera describes how her human noble foster mother made her feel ashamed of being an elf in order to save her own pride and keep up appearances. When Sera asked if they could bake cookies together, the Lady Emmald was too proud to admit she didn't know how to bake, so she bought cookies from the local bakery, passed them off as her own, and tried to keep Sera from finding out by telling her the baker didn't like elves, which started Sera's Internalized Categorism.
    Inquisitor: It was just cookies.
    Sera: It was not just cookies! Lie to herself? Fair play. Only hurts her. But she made me think there was something wrong with me! And the baker? I made his life shit. Why not? It seemed like he deserved it. I mean, "if you don't give a child a cookie because of appearances, you're a monster!" Stupid, pride-whore noble!
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War: Tailtiu joining Sigurd did not sit well with her father Reptor, who despised and plotted against Sigurd's family. When Tailtiu confronted him, Reptor declares her a traitor and gives her no quarter in battle in order to defend the reputation of House Friege. Eventually, after the Battle of Belhalla, Tailtiu's brother abducted her and her daughter from their refuge in Silesse and brought her back to Friege. Her brother maintained her father's declaration that she was a traitor and a disgrace to the family honor, kept her imprisoned in the family home, and allowed his sadistic wife to physically abuse his sister and his niece to her heart's content. Tailtiu blamed herself for it and eventually passed away from the abuse and depression. Her sister-in-law Hilda uses this trope as an excuse, but ultimately admits to Tailtiu's daughter that she did it for her own amusement.
  • Super Paper Mario: Deconstructed horrifically with Blumiere, a Rare Male Example. He fell in love with a woman named Lady Timpani and eventually got engaged to her, breaking his tribe's taboo against marriage outside of them in the process. In response, his father cursed her to wander dimensions until her death, and then callously scolded him for disgracing him and their entire tribe by his engagement to a "dirty" human girl. He eventually snapped and lashed out on "everything that had taken her away from him", even going as far as killing his father and seeking to destroy reality. Fortunately, he gets better upon finding out that his love is still alive.

    Visual Novels 
  • In Spirit Hunter: NG, after cutting down the village's sacred Kintoki Cedar, Kubitarou was strung up by her father and left to starve by the village. He then put a gag order on the village to keep them quiet about her heretical act.

    Webcomics 
  • Melusine (an anthropomorphic dolphin) in Concession was murdered by her brother-in-law for getting impregnated by a land-dweller. Said land-dweller reacted rather badly, willfully causing a disaster that destroyed her community's entire seaside city, while she came back as an insane, vengeful ghost (who, in retrospect, may have influenced the former).
  • Drowtales: Too many instances to count! Since Drow morality is directly tied around honor, many Drow see no fault with abusing their children to reclaim their honor, no matter how damaging it is to the whole household or how psychotic it makes the child. Here are the most prevalent scenes:
    • Quaintana forces Ariel to murder someone who wronged her to reclaim her fighting honor, or else she would be forced to fight her cousin to the death. She's the Drow equivalent of about eight human years old at the time. This cascades into a mental breakdown as she's too late to save her friend, she accidentally murders a slave, and she's utterly rewarded for all of this, to her horror.
    • Sil'ice is an honor-freak and seeks to bring redemption (or death) to those who have lost their honor (even if she has to torture the living daylights out of child soldiers). So when one of her children comes back with psychopath-invented demon-possession, ignoring the facts that he indirectly caused the death of Sil'ice's nemesis and achieved biological immortality from his adventures, she pretends he doesn't exist. She got better after she also suffered demon possession.
    • And of course, subverted with Snadhya'rune and Kalki; neither of them care about honor, but they're too jacked up on murder-high to think about Pragmatic Villainy and spend their last moment together blaming each other for the clusterfuck that just happened. Then the mother murders the daughter because she's a loose cannon and a red flag to her own mental instability, all while pretending she cleaned up a rotten apple on her family tree.

    Western Animation 
  • Rare Male Example: Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender experienced a ton of this from his father, Fire Lord Ozai. After Zuko spoke out against a plan to use new military recruits as cannon fodder, Ozai torched his face and banished him on a Wild Goose Chase to hunt down the Avatar (who hadn't been seen in a century). After the Avatar showed up and Zuko still didn't capture him, Ozai sent his daughter Azula to capture her brother. Eventually, Zuko was welcomed back after supposedly killing the Avatar, but then did a Heel–Face Turn and spectacularly called his father out — to which Ozai responded by trying to electrocute him. During the Grand Finale, Ozai is away fighting Aang, so Azula takes up the mantle of Honor-Related Abuse and tries to electrocute him again — and she would have succeeded if Katara hadn't stepped in to save him. Azula also suffered this to a degree. Zuko got the worst of it physically and on screen; but Azula was emotionally honor-abused with her successes to her father as a means of avoiding getting on his bad side.

noreallife


Alternative Title(s): Honour Related Abuse, Honor Killing, Honour Killing

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