Paul Schliesmann. Honour on Trial: The Shafia Murders and the Culture of Honour Killings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Paul Schliesmann. Honour on Trial: Shafia Murders and the Culture of Honour Ontario: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2012. 207 pp. $21.95 sc. Shafia trial attracted unprecedented attention in the local, national and international media. Described as a heinous case involving the honour killings of four of the Shafia female family members, it symbolized how an immigrant family chose to punish its own for violating cultural codes. According to media accounts, it was a classic tale of clash with the key words being immigrant origins and tribal, patriarchal cultures. Schliesmann, a reporter, followed the trial through its three-month span at the local Kingstone courthouse, in geographic proximity to the site of the crime--the Kingston Mills locks. There, as Schliesmann documents, in 2009, a car was found submerged in the canal. Four dead bodies were found belonging to Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia (aged 19, 17 and 13, respectively), and Rona Amir (aged 52). three younger women were daughters of Mohammad and Tooba Yahya Shafia, while Rona was Mohammad Shafia's first wife. Schliesmann offers a journalistic account of the trial recounting the evidence presented, the arguments of the prosecution and defence, and testimonies presented by numerous witnesses. Each chapter tours through the different facets of the case--from the initial investigation and interrogation by the Kingston police to the arguments presented in court. Honour on Trial is an easy read, accessible to a wide audience but lacking in any kind of scholarly analysis. Though Schliesmann includes a concluding chapter where he recounts other honour killing cases in Canada, there is little in the book that interrogates the very definition of the crime as an honour killing. book reads as a fast and condensed collection of details concerning the case, which makes it ideal for the general public interested in such crimes. However, there is scant attention paid to the very construction of this crime as a high profile event capturing mass media spotlight at this particular historical juncture. While Schliesmann does not promise any kind of analysis, the book's front cover suggests otherwise: The Shafia Murders and the Culture of Honour Killings. What is the of honour killings'? And how is being understood in this particular context? A reading of the text suggests that a number of critical assumptions underpin Schliesmann's recounting of the case. In the discussion that follows, I take up some of these assumptions, arguing that many are embedded in a discourse of Orientalism, which as author Edward Said has eloquently argued, constructs a particularly unfavourable view of the Orient as the Other, and in which the Orient represents everything that is opposite and inferior to the West. My discussion is not intended to discount the horrendous murders of these women, or to minimize the violence they suffered. Rather, I wish to draw out and expand on the kinds of taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin even empathic accounts of femicides involving women from racialized communities. In his introduction to the book, Schliesmann argues, With the murders, it became obvious that a new wave of immigration had brought with it challenges for young women wanting to fit into Canadian culture (xi). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".