Honor suicide

Honor suicide is a process whereby a person commits suicide to escape the shame of any immoral actions, for example having had extra-marital sexual relations.

There are also documented cases in where other person/-s has pressured a victim to kill himself/herself to avoid penalties for murdering him/her in an honor killing; this practice is known as forced suicide.

A recent phenomenon of honor suicides occurred in Turkey and a special envoy for the United Nations named Yakin Erturk was sent to Turkey to investigate a number of suspicious suicides amongst Kurdish girls in a Kurdish area of southeast Anatolia, which is poor, rural and deeply influenced by conservative culture. The envoy was quoted by The New York Times as saying that some suicides appeared in Kurdish-inhabited regions of Turkey to be "honor killings disguised as a suicide or an accident."