LIZ JONES: Honour killings? What we've done to young Emma is just as shameful

 Two very different teenage girls made headlines around the world last week. The first was  , the 19-year-old star of the Harry Potter movie franchise.

She was named as the highest-earning female in Hollywood in 2009, only one of two women to make it on to the list of the industry’s top 20 earners.
The second was 16-year-old Medine Memi – her first name means ‘civilisation’. Her body was discovered tied to a chair in a hole in the garden of her home in a small village in south-eastern Turkey.
She had been buried alive as punishment for having talked to boys on the telephone. We know she was buried alive because of the amount of soil found in her stomach and lungs. Her father and her grandfather have been arrested.

Is it a coincidence that  is the highest paid actress in the world and also incredibly young?

The two young women are worlds apart, of course. Medine lived in a country mired in the dominance of a medieval, backwards-thinking, feudal patriarchy, albeit one that has been taking steps to stamp out violence towards women in its bid to be allowed into the European Union.
In 1998, the country’s supreme court overturned a law that criminalised adultery. In 2004, it introduced mandatory life sentences for those who carry out so-called ‘honour’ killings.
But despite these measures it continues to fail to protect its women and children. Four out of ten women in Turkey are beaten by their husbands. Half of all murders are ‘honour’ killings.
In an attempt to circumvent the stiffer sentences, ‘honour suicides’ have mushroomed.
Batman, a town in the south-east of Turkey, has been nicknamed ‘Suicide City’: three-quarters of all suicides here are committed by women – nearly everywhere else in the world, men are three times more likely to kill themselves.
Women who are told to kill themselves are usually given three options: a noose, a gun or rat poison. They are then locked in a room until they have done the deed.
Despite all of the above, President Obama made no mention of this shocking record on women’s rights in the speech he made during a visit to Istanbul last year in which he urged the EU to welcome Turkey with open arms.
He concentrated instead on the far less controversial issue of global warming.
But let’s look at Emma Watson for a moment. Is it a coincidence that she is the highest-paid actress in the world – and also incredibly young, known only for her portrayal of a virginal schoolgirl?
You might have thought Meryl Streep would have been up there on that list somewhere. Or Helen Mirren, or the director Kathyrn Bigelow. But no. The richest (and I hesitate to use the word powerful here) woman in Hollywood is also necessarily the weakest: a child.
The most powerful men are inevitably all ancient and unglamorous with old-lady arms: James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and their ilk. Like Islam, Hollywood is a clannish, backwards-thinking, oppressive, patriarchal society intent on keeping women firmly in their place.
I don’t mean to trivialise what happened to Medine. Her murder was horrific, and the perpetrators should be punished. But all cultures, the world over, celebrate pure, young women.
Girls in Afghanistan are staying home because of a spate of acid attacks. In Italy, a country where until 1981 ‘honour’ was an ‘extenuating circumstance’ for murder, a young Moroccan woman was murdered last autumn by her father for wearing jeans.
In Iran, honour killings are legal. In Pakistan, a 17-year-old girl who, it was claimed, became pregnant by a man who was not her husband was forced to give birth before having her baby thrown to its death in a canal. The teenager was then mauled by dogs before being fatally shot in the head.
But can we in the West really claim the moral high ground when it comes to condemning these ‘honour’ killings’?
I would counter that the number of women harmed psychologically and physically by the West’s obsession with extreme youth far outstrips the number of women who are murdered for adultery, or even for the ‘crime’ of being the victim of rape in Islamic countries.
Every society has things it should be ashamed of. We have battered wives, domestic violence, child abuse, rape. These crimes are not done in the name of religion, other than as part of our cult of worshipping only women who are barely adolescent.
Violence against women is widespread in all countries. In Britain, 45 per cent have experienced some form of domestic abuse. In Germany, that figure is 37 per cent. Let’s not make this a war against Islam.
Let’s make it a war between genders, and try to fix it with education and emancipation, not prejudice.