Designing a Study of Honor-Based Violence (HBV) in the United States (303385)

Keywords: honor-based violence, HBV, honor violence, domestic violence, questionnaire design, crime surveys, vulnerable populations

How does one study a culture of violence so extreme that victims may be killed on the basis of a rumor? Honor-based violence (HBV) is a form of domestic violence in which families coerce, abuse, or even kill members whose actions threaten to shame or dishonor the family’s reputation. It includes physical, psychological, and emotional abuse, female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriage, forced suicide, and murder. Victims are usually older girls and young women, and the perpetrators are usually one or more members of their immediate and extended families. In multiple cases, victims and witnesses have been murdered for bringing attention to the violence.

In 2014, Congress issued a mandate to determine if extant federal data collection mechanisms could be used to estimate the prevalence of HBV in the US. In response, we conducted a thorough environmental scan concerning HBV with a special focus on existing US government ongoing data collections and possible measures that could be adapted to fit in ongoing data collections. At the time of our original research (completed in November 2015), we determined that existing data collection mechanisms could not be used without endangering victims or requiring costly redesign.

We will discuss the limitations of these data collections for measuring HBV, including the effect of safety considerations on respondent selection, the lack of an appropriate sampling frame, and the complexity of measure development. We will also discuss other studies, measures, and methods for prevalence estimation that we identified in our environmental scan, including those used in Europe for the study of HBV and methods used in the US to study other crimes, such as domestic violence and human trafficking. We close with a discussion of possible next steps in measuring this phenomena and collecting data on it.