Honor-based violence is not an anomaly but a foreseeable outcome when Western immigration systems admit families without examining the cultural codes they bring. Until democracies confront these tensions honestly, the women they promise to protect will remain the first to pay the price. Just days ago, on Nov. 29, 2025, Dutch prosecutors asked a court to impose 25 years in prison on the father and long sentences on the two brothers of 18-year-old Ryan Al-Najjar, the Syrian refugee they are accused of murdering in an honor killing. The men allegedly drowned her in a marsh last spring after she began to live as her Dutch peers do: choosing her own clothes, spending time with classmates, and forming a relationship with a Dutch boy. Her father fled to Syria; her brothers are now on trial. (RELATED: Import the Third World, Become the Third World) The evidence paints a deliberate act. Ryan disappeared on May 22, 2024. A week later, her body was found in wetlands near Lelystad, bound, gagged, and with water in her lungs. Digital messages and DNA evidence underpin prosecutors’ claim that her father directed the killing and her brothers executed it. The alleged motive is not ambiguous: Ryan’s ordinary assimilation into Dutch norms was treated as an intolerable breach of family honor. (RELATED: Why Is Italy Killing Its Women?) Domestic-violence models assume gradual escalation and individual actors. Honor violence can erupt suddenly, collectively, and in response to one perceived moral transgression. More troubling still is that Ryan had sought help. Local reporting suggests she once fled her home barefoot, telling neighbours she feared her father intended to kill her. She was placed under police protection, which was later withdrawn. Dutch authorities have not fully explained why. The sequence reveals a blind spot in Western risk-assessment frameworks. Domestic-violence models assume gradual escalation and individual actors. Honor violence can erupt suddenly, collectively, and in response to one perceived moral transgression. When Western institutions misread these signals, even a well-designed system can fail at the moment it is needed most. (RELATED: How Sweden’s Demographic Winter Turned It Into Europe’s Rape Capital) The Al-Najjar case also illustrates a larger structural challenge within Western immigration systems. Asylum and refugee pathways increasingly admit families without any meaningful examination of whether the social codes they carry align with the civic expectations of the host society. The assumption that integration happens automatically — and that cultural conflicts dissolve upon contact with liberal norms — has proved overly optimistic. Honor-based violence is not created by migration, but it is enabled when humanitarian admission is combined with minimal vetting, inconsistent integration requirements, and political reluctance to confront value clashes openly. Illegal migration compounds the problem by placing entire families outside formal oversight, leaving women at risk and largely invisible to authorities. The asylum model is designed to protect the vulnerable, yet in practice can import the pressures that endanger them. (RELATED: Trump’s Third-World Ban Misses the One Thing That Actually Matters) Across the West, similar cases appear — not frequently, but frequently enough to challenge the belief that these impulses remain geographically contained. In the United States, a 17-year-old Iraqi-American girl survived after classmates intervened while her parents attempted to strangle her outside a high school; prosecutors cited her refusal of an arranged marriage as the trigger. In the Netherlands, a Kurdish-Dutch woman named Roshin was murdered by relatives who saw her divorce as a provocation rather than a personal choice. Sweden saw a pregnant young woman strangled by her Somali-born partner, allegedly out of fear his family would reject the relationship and the unborn child. And in Australia, a Pakistani-Australian woman was stabbed in a suburban shopping center car park for choosing a partner outside her family’s religious expectations, an act prosecutors described as an attempted honor killing. Earlier cases, including the murders of Saman Abbas in Italy and Aqsa Parvez in Canada, underline a consistent pattern: when a young woman’s autonomy conflicts with an inherited code of obedience, geography alone does not prevent violence. Part of the difficulty Western governments face in addressing this phenomenon is that their own systems obscure it. Police departments routinely categorise honor-based incidents under generic domestic-violence headings. Prosecutors often pursue them without referencing ideological motives. Courts tend to avoid mentioning honor or religious pressure even when relatives invoke them directly. In consequence, honor killing rarely appears in European or North American crime statistics. The lack of data reflects not the absence of cases but an institutional reluctance to name the motive, creating a statistical blind spot in which policy cannot effectively operate. To understand the motive, one must look at the regions where honor-based violence is most prevalent. In Pakistan, authorities recorded 1,553 honor-related murders between 2021 and 2024, including 392 in 2023, while NGOs estimate more than 1,000 cases annually due to underreporting. In Iran, IranWire documented 186 honor killings in 2023 and 136 in the first nine months of 2024, many involving teenage girls killed by fathers or brothers who received minimal sentences. Jordan officially reports 15-20 such murders yearly, though researchers note significantly higher numbers in tribal regions. Iraq saw protests after the father of 22-year-old Tiba Al-Ali strangled her for living independently, yet little legislative change followed. And Turkey recorded 331 femicides in 2022, many tied to honor codes. These patterns endure because in several countries the legal system itself — often shaped by Islamic jurisprudence — mitigates or excuses honor killings. In Iran, a father who kills his daughter cannot be executed under qisas, which treats him as her guardian, resulting in comparatively light sentences. In Jordan, until recent reforms, Articles 340 and 98 reduced penalties for killings committed in a “fit of fury,” long interpreted to include honor crimes. In Pakistan, the “forgiveness” clause allowed families to pardon the perpetrator. And in parts of Iraq and the Gulf, honor killings fall under “defence of family honor,” often receiving reduced charges. These are not historical footnotes; they are active legal frameworks influencing sentencing outcomes today. None of this is an argument for suspicion toward immigrant families. It is an argument for candor, for acknowledging that certain patriarchal norms do not reliably disappear upon relocation. They require deliberate countermeasures: clear legal definitions, specialised policing, mandatory integration frameworks, and a willingness to confront cultural practices that conflict with individual rights. Minimising these tensions leaves vulnerable women exposed to preventable harm. The Al-Najjar case shows the stakes. Ryan believed she had reached a society where autonomy was protected. The Netherlands, in principle, offered exactly that. What it could not shield her from was the worldview that travelled with her family — a worldview that read her independence not as maturity but as defiance. Liberal democracies can preserve their values only if they recognise when those values are being quietly contested inside their own borders. Without that clarity, they risk protecting freedom in theory while losing it in practice. READ MORE from Kevin Cohen: In Minnesota, Echoes of Failed Somali Experiment in Europe How Sweden’s Demographic Winter Turned It Into Europe’s Rape Capital The Vanishing Englishman: Inside the Schools Forecasting the UK Future