The culture of honor as a deterrent to rape: Theory and data from across countries

[Updated in the comments with data on German and Indian states]

Emily Yoffe wrote a column in Slate about the urgent need to stop lying to young women, and to warn them of the danger of being raped after a night of binge drinking that could render them incapable of defending themselves against a sleazoid who wouldn't mind having sex with a girl who was passed out. The critical response was just as cogent, insightful, and charitable as you would predict for a debate of the 21st century. In a follow-up column she defended herself against the backlash.

She framed her argument in feminist terms -- educating women so that they can take fuller control over their lives, and thereby avoid one of the more unsettling harms that face college students (and by extension, any group of women who binge drink in the company of strange men, perhaps in unfamiliar places). This feminist approach seems like the only way for concerned people to get a respectable hearing -- but then I value my dignity over my respectability.

I think we have far more to learn from masculine cultures of honor about how to prevent rape, whether in the violent sense or the "taking advantage of a passed out drunk" sense. It wouldn't occur to respectable people to take such a cross-cultural look because everybody knows that those culture of honor societies are notoriously anti-feminist -- and therefore must be plagued by rape even more than us civilized culture of law societies. In the mainstream mind, whether liberal or conservative, us looking to Armenia for rape prevention strategies would be like a pudgy American turning to the Samoans for dietary advice.

And yet in 2006, the rape rate in Armenia was just 0.2 vs. 46 for Sweden (per 100,000 population) -- or 230 times higher in homeland of IKEA. In fact, feminazi Scandinavia, the Baltics, and northern Europe in general fares rather pathetically when compared to the Balkans, Near East, and broader Mediterranean area. Here is a table listing countries by rape rate across several recent years.

Before examining the table in detail, what is the basic link between a culture of honor and low rape rates? Quite simply, they are not afraid to fight fire with fire. If someone rapes an Armenian girl, all of her male kinsmen will come out of the woodwork to track down the offender, light his body on fire, and have it torn to pieces by wild horses. Sounds like a strong deterrent to me.

In such cultures, female sexuality is a commodity owned and controlled by her male blood relatives -- if you want her, you need to seek and obtain approval from those men first -- hence rape is a trespass upon those men's property (the woman's body). Because men in honor-driven cultures strive to avenge all trespasses, especially the more flagrant ones, killing the rapist of a female relative is just a special case of their obsession with driving away trespassers. And this basic mindset can be extended, by the notion of "fictive kin," to protect "our women" in the community, even if they happen to be unrelated to us.

Way too much attention gets devoted to how cultures of honor treat the female victim of rape, which include varying degrees of casting her out. They're not blaming her for the attack, but viewing her more as a car that's been vandalized and wrecked by a criminal. The criminal they've already executed -- now what to do with the car that may be damaged beyond repair? Can't exactly have it sitting out in the driveway where the neighbors could see it. It looks bad in itself, and gives us a reputation as the kind of men who can't defend their own car from getting busted up by vandals. Better then to sequester it from public view, perhaps having to get rid of it altogether if it's beyond repair.

You don't have to identify with that attitude, but this exercise in cross-cultural empathy lets us understand the logic of ostracizing the female victim in cultures of honor. Once you view female sexuality as a commodity owned and controlled by the male relatives, the entire paragraph above follows naturally.

Sure, even us part or full hillbillies who find a lot of value in honor over legalism will find it hard to go all the way toward viewing female sexuality in strictly kin-controlled-commodity terms. But we could certainly gain a lot by moving farther in that direction, reversing the course we're on toward telling people that everything will be OK because laws and law enforcement are there to prevent and rescue them from danger.

That optimism in statist social engineering is particularly naive when it comes to preventing and punishing rape. It is the most notoriously murky of the violent crimes to judge the facts of the case, unlike a murder which leaves a dead body with signs of trauma. Typically all that can be ascertained in a rape complaint is if intercourse took place, not necessarily whether force was involved. And as a source in Yoffe's column points out, "drunken sex" shades into "sex with a dazed or passed-out girl," and there's no bright line crossed. Hence a neutral third party like the courts will be justifiably reluctant to prosecute a complaint, compared to a murder. Policemen could patrol homicidal hot spots, but are they really going to stroll around every college party giving a nasty stare to would-be feeler-uppers? Get real.

All of that is to say that we need more personally motivated parties to prevent and punish rape, like the girl's male kinsmen -- or fictive kinsmen. Don't let women move too far away from their kin. And more cohesive communities would result in much the same protective behavior. Hence, rather than supporting the "do whatever you want" and "don't hold me to any communal norms," which lead to atomization and lack of concern for your fellow man (or woman), we need to tell folks that they can't do whatever they want, that they're being held to communal standards of appropriate behavior -- like, say, not downing 12 drinks in 2 hours and passing out near a group of strange males. Hard to believe, but somehow the world kept spinning just fine when that was the norm.

In cultures of honor, women rarely go around without an escort or chaperon -- especially around groups of strange men in unfamiliar places. We don't have to go all the way toward locking them up in the harem, of course. But an honor-based attitude would have us looking after unattended or isolated women in such circumstances, not out of a white knight sense of rescuing the unfortunate, but because those women are our women, and you have to go through us first if you want to try your luck with the ladies. Honor-driven policing of female behavior would severely cut down on the prevalence of unattended or isolated women in a dazed or passed-out state near strange men outside the home -- one of the least favorable circumstances for women wishing to avoid rape.

Getting back to the table, all sorts of control variables need to be taken into account when comparing countries. For one, which year or years do you choose? If you sort them within each year, the basic ranking doesn't seem to change that much. But they might change a bit more if there's a rising or falling trend in any of the countries -- 10 or 20 years out, the rising ones will, well, rise, and the falling ones will fall in the ranking. For the rest of the post, I'll refer to 2006 estimates.

Wealth or income won't matter since there are too many rich and poor countries at each level of rape rates. The murder rate, or some other measure of violent tendencies, would be necessary to control for how likely folks are to resort to violence to solve life's problems. I think the best catch-all variable to control for is rough geographic region. That will lessen the impact of race, testosterone level of local males, level of development, recent history, and so on.

Looking on a region-by-region basis, we see that cultures of honor have lower rape rates than more progressive cultures of law. Generally that maps onto pastoralism vs. intensive agriculture, though not perfectly. For example, England and Wales had a rape rate of 26, Scotland 18, and Ireland 9. Ask paparazzi-swatter Alec Baldwin if he has any ideas about how Irish culture keeps women better protected from the unwanted advances of strange males.

Belgium has a rate of 31, France 16 (only part of which is the weenie frog culture of law up in the north -- see the post below on French highlanders kicking out the Gypsies), Switzerland 9, and Italy 8. Moving to the southwest, Spain's is 5, and Portugal's 3.

Among Germanic nations, the rate descends from the highs of Scandinavia -- 46 for Sweden, 24 for Iceland (yes, you read that correctly), 18 for Norway, and a more respectable 10 for Denmark -- down through a rate of 10 in Germany (which is split between legalists in the northeast and more honor-driven southerners), reaching a low of 9 in both Switzerland and Austria.

By my hypothesis, the Balto-Slavic countries of the Great European Plain ought to have higher rates than the parts of Europe farther south and west. Yet they're about the same or slightly lower, depending on exactly which countries you compare. However, within Eastern Europe, there's a clear gradient from higher rates in the northern half than in the Balkans. There's 11 for Estonia, 7 for Lithuania and Moldova, 6 for Russia and Latvia, 5 for the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania, 4 for Belarus, 3 for Slovakia, and 2 for Ukraine. In the honor-obsessed and blood-feuding Balkan mountain region, the maximum is only 5 for Macedonia, falling to 4 for Croatia and Bulgaria, 3 for Slovenia and Turkey, 2 for Montenegro and Greece, and 1 for Albania, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It's like they say -- an armed society is a polite society.

So, even on a smaller scale we see the relationship hold up, as Albanians and Montenegrins and Serbs are ground zero for the Balkan culture of honor (kanun, osveta), and not quite so much Bulgaria and Croatia. And sure enough, it is the former that have less than half the rape rates of the latter.

Semitic or Indo-European-speaking countries in the Near and Middle East with rates below 1 -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Tajikistan.

It looks like the Turkic and Mongolian speaking pastoralists have higher rates than that, from below 1 in Turkmenistan to a high of 12 in Mongolia. Although they're pastoralists, they do fall outside the standard realm of "cultures of honor," which is more circum-Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and (partly) South Asian. Francisco Gil-White studied nomadic pastoralists in western Mongolia and thought they had something approximating a culture of honor, but not a fully developed one like you saw in the American South. So, sticking with the degree of honor rather than of pastoralism, the place of the Central Asian cases between the Near East and Northern Europe supports the hypothesis.

What about all of the countries with primarily sub-Saharan black populations? They have pretty high rape rates, with South Africa far out in the lead at 138. These also support the hypothesis, as most of those places lack a culture of honor, living as tropical horticulturalists. Culture of law folks often confuse an emphasis on toughness with the culture of honor, and lord knows that black folks want it to be known that you don't mess around with them. However, honor's twin is hospitality -- all of the canonical cultures of honor are also cultures of hospitality. They are more precisely speaking "cultures of reciprocity."

Bantu speakers and their off-shoots outside of Africa don't have reputations as cultures of hospitality, where taking care of guests and strangers passing through is a sacred duty. It's more dog-eat-dog. And they aren't obsessed with making sure their womenfolk stay sexually pure. For one thing, black women are too willful, and for another, black men just don't care that much at the end of the day. In pastoralist groups, men are responsible for just about all of the food production (maintaining the herds), while horticulturalist women do more productive work than the men (tending the gardens). So how can the men threaten the women to obey their moral sexual code? If she wants to put herself in harm's way, her male kinsmen aren't going to surround her and tell her, "The hell you are." What can you do? -- she's an Independent Woman.

Unfortunately, according to the global data, countries with lots of Independent Women have far higher rape rates than those where they're more under-watch or even under lock and key.

The same applies to largely Amerindian countries in the New World that also tend to have high rape rates, such as Nicaragua at 28, Panama and Peru at 24, El Salvador at 19, and so on. Don't confuse toughness or thuggishness with honor -- if they aren't also obsessed with hospitality, and with clamping down on women who would flaunt their sexuality, they aren't cultures of honor.

I don't claim that the level of honor-focus in a culture is all that determines the rape rate, or that it would be simple to switch from a more law-oriented to a more honor-oriented set of norms. But we've been there before, and fairly recently, so we can get there again. It'll be easier where the population is of Mediterranean, Celtic, and Franco-German highlander stock, and harder elsewhere -- especially where they're more African and Amerindian.

And I don't envision the change as one of policy so much as a process of "consciousness-raising" across the grassroots level, as the activists would have said. For those of us from hilly/mountain roots, it's just awakening a drive that's already there deep down. As for the more legalistic Saxons and Scandinavians -- we'll just have to exert a little peer pressure to make them go along. Failing that, we can form our own regions and do as we see best. If the blonds are willing to trade off higher rape rates for a lower obsession with honor, then that's their prerogative, warped as we may find it.