An honor killing is a murder, nearly exclusively of a woman who has been perceived as having brought dishonor to her family. Such killings are typically perpetrated by the victim's own relatives and/or community and unlike a crime of passion or rage-induced killing, it is usually planned in advance. In societies and cultures where they occur, such killings are often regarded as a "private matter" for the affected family alone, and courts rarely become involved or prosecute the perpetrators.
Honour killings have been continually mistaken to be a practice encouraged by Islam; this is due to the fact that honour killings are often perpetrated in Muslim-majority areas, especially in countries of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East. However the Qur'an and the Hadith mention nothing about honour killings, and such murders are almost always associated with pre-Islamic cultural patterns in the societies which condone them. For example, while honour killing is widespread among rural Muslim tribes in Pakistan, India, and various Arab countries, it is virtually unknown in the Muslim communities of Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the annual worldwide total of honor-killing victims may be as high as 5,000 women.