Shahnaz Laghari
sbll500@york.ac.uk
I am a new PhD student at Centre of Women Studies at York. I belong to Pakistan where I worked as a lecturer for couple of years. I write short stories in my national language Urdu and two books of my short stories have been published. Besides, I have done translation of two books from Sindhi to Urdu. Apart from teaching I have a reasonable experience of working on television as an anchor person and interviewer.
My research topic for PhD is “Honour Killing in Pakistan” To narrow down the research I would like to remain restricted to Sindh, (one of the four provinces of Pakistan) where most of the cases of honour killing happen. A closer look at the killings in Pakistani perspective shows that over the course of six years, over 4,000 women have fallen victim to this practice in Pakistan from 1999 to 2004. More recently, in 2005, the average annual number of honor killings for the whole nation ran up to more than 10,000 per year. Thus, I aim to investigate what Amnesty International report noted "the failure of the authorities to prevent these killings by investigating and punishing the perpetrators.”