Dubai: A five-year-old Syrian has been stabbed to death by her family after a stranger raped the girl, Syrian media reported.
According to reports, the victim’s body was found in a garbage container in Manbij city and the body was transferred to Al Furat Hospital, in the eastern countryside of Aleppo.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has called on competent authorities to hold the killers accountable for their crime, adding that the “honour” killings have become widespread in Syria. On July 6 last year, a man strangled his 16-year-old daughter in the city of Hasaka, after she was raped by her cousin.
Generally defined as the killing of a family member, usually a woman, in response to a perceived disgraceful act, honour killings were traditionally seen as cleansing a family of the shame of the victim’s actions.
However, the crime is increasingly seeing public backlash, as communities demand an end to the practice and accountability for perpetrators. While honour killings are illegal in Syria, loopholes still exist and in practice these crimes are often not pursued by authorities, preserving the impunity of perpetrators and putting women at risk.
Before 2009, the Syrian law was excusing the male perpetrator from the honour killing crime in circumstances where he acts after being taken by surprise or caught in a “state of anger”, to defend his “honour” by killing a female relative for engaging in “illicit” sexual relations.
In 2009, the first amendment to the law was enacted in Syria, stipulating that perpetrators motivated by the defence of their honour would be sentenced to a minimum of two years in prison. In 2011 the sentence was increased to between five and seven years, until the law was abolished, along with its amendments in 2020. And now, honour killings are considered a crime and treated according to the law like other crimes without any consideration or mitigation.
