@EmbarrassingHadrosaurus
To be blunt, "honour killings" are what we call the actions of family annihilators who happen to be Muslim. And it is not a good practice because it stops us from seeing the truth behind the cases.
Thank you for that very helpful perspective which is more informed than the coverage that's typically available to us.
I tend to notice the stories that involve women and children. Is it common than I realise for "honour killings" to involve the death of men and boys in the style of family annihilator with which I'm more familiar (although it's typically the father/man who kills the woman and the children)?
I can't think of a case off the top of my head where there has been a son victim alone, probably because they are not then reported as an "honour" killing. There have been "honour" cases that have involved all the children through.
Ten to one, it's always a family with a very disturbed male individual in it, usually the father, though it is sometimes the eldest son or an uncle. What tends to have happened is that the males in the family, maybe even the neighbourhood itself, have protected themselves from the disturbed individual though employing non-confrontation as a tactic.
In short, they go along with the behaviour to keep the peace. This then enables the behaviour and, eventually, the disturbed individual escalates to the point of murder because the paranoia, the psychosis, it has all been left unchecked.
One of the issues is that these cases tend to occur in very rural areas, and this is used as a kind of excuse by the wider culture: "oh, well, they are villagers, aren't they?" The concept of the 'villager' often has overtones of Royston Vasey in many Middle Eastern cultures.
But I do suspect it is actually the other way round. These cases occur more in rural areas because, in urban areas, you cannot get away with very troubling "alarm bell" behaviour as easily as you can in a more isolated village. In urban areas, neighbours call the police and there are police that will attend that do not have ties to the family or the specific situation, and so on.
I do know, for example, there have been some cases where it is pretty obvious the annihilator has had severe PTSD, usually through an experience of war, has then come home to their village or been resettled elsewhere, and their mind has just deteriorated to the point of criminal insanity. There's a couple of terrorist backgrounds that are quite similar to that model as well.