Gendered surveillance, informal justice, and collateral victimisation: A socio-legal ethnographic study of honour-based violence in rural Balochistan

Abstract

Honour-based violence (HBV) remains one of the most durable expressions of gender inequality in Pakistan, sustained by the interaction of patriarchal norms, informal social control and plural legal orders. That interaction is especially visible in rural Balochistan, a vast, arid and thinly populated province in which tribal authority and customary adjudication frequently operate in place of the state. Although the Constitution guarantees fundamental rights and honour killing is a criminal offence, such killings persist wherever kin-based networks, rather than police stations and courts, exercise effective jurisdiction over everyday disputes. Scholarship has tended to concentrate on the relationship between victim and perpetrator, leaving the structural conditions of the violence and its intergenerational aftermath comparatively unexamined. Drawing on a qualitative socio-legal study of an unreported honour killing in rural Balochistan, this article examines how violence in the name of honour functions as an instrument of punitive social control. The empirical material consists of focus groups and semi-structured interviews with community members, legal practitioners and law-enforcement personnel. It is read through legal pluralism, feminist legal theory and the concept of gendered surveillance, and is triangulated against a doctrinal review of reported trial-court and appellate decisions. The article advances the notion of collateral victimisation to capture the secondary harms (bereavement, displacement, neglect, economic decline and transmitted trauma) borne by dependent children and surviving relatives. It argues that honour violence in this setting is not merely a criminal aberration but a socially negotiated process, maintained by pervasive surveillance, parallel tribal adjudication and institutional failure.