Honor suicide is a process whereby a Muslim woman commits suicide to escape the shame of having been raped or having had extra-marital sexual relations, thereby violating the namus of her family. There are also documented cases in which relatives pressured a victim to kill herself to avoid penalties for murdering her in an honor killing; this practice is known as forced suicide.

A recent phenomenon of honor suicides occurred in Turkey and a special envoy for the United Nations named Yakin Erturk was sent to Turkey to investigate a number of suspicious suicides amongst Kurdish girls. The envoy was quoted by The New York Times as saying that some suicides appeared in Kurdish-inhabited regions of Turkey to be "honor killings disguised as a suicide or an accident."^[1][2]

[edit] See also

• Honor killing
• Forced suicide

[edit] References