Black Sheep Violence
In 2012, the social worker that failed to offer Sahar Shafia foster care testified at her parents’ and brother’s murder trial that she did so because Sahar “was not at risk”. She went on to ask “How could we know?” That is the question Paristi Project seeks to answer, more specifically:
“What do help seeking victims know about their own circumstances that allow them to accurately predict their own murders while the social workers who seek to help them cannot?”
Paristi Project seeks to move front-line helpers who triage family violence cases toward a demographically neutral definition of honour-based violence/black-sheep violence (BSV) so that the problem of honour-based violence is defined in terms of the socio-economic relationships between the perpetrators and their targets so that the following dynamic can be exposed:
BSV can be modelled using game theory of a public goods game that allows the formation of multi-player coalitions. BSV is premeditated and escalating violence by a coalition against a dissenter/defector whose beliefs or behaviours threaten to collapse cooperation within the coalition.
Cooperation is enforced by the coalition using both:
- simplex altruistic punishment (which punishes individual defectors); and
- duplex altruistic punishment (which punishes third-party bystanders who fail to punish individual defectors).