Honorable

Wood carving detail
Ceiling in Ottoman house (Bait Al Suhaymi)

You can read about new and exciting ways to make your daughters suffer in Turkey, here.

A few months ago, I dragged my parental units to the Expo Center in Karachi and walked out with some dusty new paperbacks. One of them was the Pulitzer winner Snow. I'm not going to pretend I've come close to finishing the book (That's what Spring breaks are for!), but one of the things that Orhan Pamuk talks about is the suicide trend in Batman, in relation to the rise of the suicides in the town his book is set.
Sidenote: The book itself is a hard read. The character development moves like molasses in winter, and the plot, which is a little obvious, can be a little boring. However, parts of the story involve the main character wandering from house to house in a fictional Turkish town asking why their daughter committed suicide. Orhan Pamuk's families however (up until where I've read) share their distress and horror when speaking of their daughter's suicide.
In Batman, it seems these daughters are urged to commit suicide to take blame off their eldest sons, who would be jailed if caught for an honor killing.

Many of you will remember Batman for its ridiculous and somewhat childish attempt to sue Warner Bros for using the name Batman for the title of the movie Batman. However, this Anatolian town had been nicknamed 'Suicide City' for ages before Heath Ledger and Christopher Nolan became involved in its media coverage.

I can't figure out what's worse:
-being locked in your room until you kill yourself
-not killing yourself and then being murdered anyway
-a police force that believes that the murder for honor was justifiable and thus doesn't investigate the case sufficiently

The sociology major in me is drawn to this story-
Remember when around September of 2007, international media went insane about the Iraqi women lighting themselves on fire?
The newsweek article highlights that after a certain point, everyone in Kurdistan would interject "I'll just light myself on fire!" when something didn't really go their way.

That brings me to my question- Will this just keep resulting in a neverending cycle of misery for Turkish conservative women who are being told: 'You have dishonoured your family, please kill yourself'?