Based on three's criticism, I've changed my essay to account for it.
I'm presenting it here to ask you guys for criticism. Does it address three's concerns?
Here's the new beginning.
Honor violence is a sort of violence committed where the perpetrator's goal is to regain his tribe's honor, his family's honor, and his own honor. In most cases it’s planned by a family, and committed by one or more men of that family, to a woman who has done something against cultural or religious norms like rejecting an arranged marriage, or adopting a Western lifestyle. It’s a huge problem in Islamic communities[1], and it’s something that doesn’t exist at all in so many other communities.
There are three flaws to discuss here. The main flaw is intolerance -- the idea that it's best for a person to initiate violence on another person because he has dissenting ideas. A second flaw is the idea that a person's social status is important and should be sought after and preserved. And a third flaw is that a person's social status should be, in any way, linked with his family's, and tribe's social status. An important thing to note here is that these flaws are connected, in the sense that they are caused by the same kind of thinking. To clarify, I'm not talking about which flaw is more or less to blame for a person committing honor violence. What I'm talking about is that all of these flaws must be there, in order for a person to think it's best for him to commit honor violence.
And here's the new ending.
So the status-based attitude is what causes people to care about honor, or social status. They have an intense desire for status, and it can pervade practically all of their thinking. Now, in tribal cultures, another flaw they have, aside from this status-based attitude, is that a person's social status should be linked to his family and tribe. And in some tribal cultures, especially the ones where Islam is dominant, they have a strong tradition linking their status with the women of the tribe. Now, combine this status-based attitude and these other flaws, with the attitude that it's morally right to initiate violence in response to a dissenter, and what you have is somebody willing to commit honor violence (including honor killings) against his daughters, sisters, and other female members of his community, and on anybody who he perceives to be lowering his status/respect/honor.
I should clarify something about the relationship between the individual and the community. It is true that a Muslim man who commits honor violence is being pressured by his family to commit the violence as a means of preserving their social status, but whether or not he acts on that pressure, or even feels that pressure, depends on his ideas. Will he care what his family and community thinks? Well, in those communities, a lot of the opportunities for a man, like getting married or having a good job, depends on the status of his family and his tribe. So if a woman taints his family's status, and if he doesn't remove that taint by killing her, then he'll lose those opportunities. But so what? He could forego all of those "opportunities" by fleeing the country with his daughter. If he doesn't do that, it's because of his evil ideas.
Topic: Honor Violence: Why nobody should demand respect