'Honor' Violence Against Women Surging in UK

(NEWSER) - Pressure from British and German leaders over legalized rape in Afghanistan has pushed President Hamid Karzai to order a review of a law governing Shiites, Reuters reports. Karzai said the Justice Ministry would scrutinize the Shiite Personal Status Law and send it back to parliament if necessary. But he said Western officials had misunderstood the law, which has been approved but not enacted. More»

CDC conducts first study for new annual report

(NEWSER) - A new CDC study—the first in what will be annual reports on violence between intimate partners—has some rough numbers, as per Bloomberg and the Washington Post :

• 1 in 4 women have been physically assaulted by a husband or boyfriend
• 1 in 5 women have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives
• 1 in 6 women have been stalked
• 1 in 7 men have been physically assaulted by a partner
• About 1.3 million women were sexually assaulted in the year prior to the study
• Most who have experienced such violence did so before age 25

Dad slammed car into 'Americanized' daughter: prosecutors

(NEWSER) - An Iraqi immigrant charged with slamming his car into his daughter in a shocking Arizona "honor killing" heads to court this month. Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 50, faces life in prison if convicted of killing his 20-year-old daughter, Noor, who refused an arranged marriage in Iraq and moved into her boyfriend's Phoenix home. She was in a coma for 2 weeks before she died, reports AP . Shortly before she was struck, she spotted her father stalking her and texted a friend: "Dude, my dad is here. I've honestly never met anyone with so much evil." More»

Afghan girls expecting help beaten instead

(NEWSER) - When Khadija, 13, and Basgol, 14, escaped from the much older men they'd been forced to marry, they thought the police would help. Instead, the police officers who found the girls fleeing on a bus sent them back to their home village to be brutally flogged for running away from their husbands. The two girls' fate is nothing unusual in Afghanistan, where marriage of girls under 16 and public flogging—though both illegal—remain widespread. More»

First use of capital punishment for this crime

(NEWSER) - The village elders hunted the young couple down, dragging them from a bus, strangling the groom and forcing his bride to drink pesticide in an honor killing with roots thousands of years old. But for the first time, India has sentenced the murderers to death for their actions, setting up a showdown between long-held tradition and cries for overhauling what some say are archaic rules, reports the Washington Post . More»