To own a female is to own a prized possession. For it is a woman's body that brings forth the new generation. And it is a woman who nurtures that new generation. And it is women who have, through the millennia, suffered the gross indignity, psychical harm, physical battering that comes with representing property rights.

We live in a modern era, the 21st Century. We live in a presumably egalitarian world where women, under the law, have equal rights with their male counterparts. That is, of course, contingent on where you live in the world. And, of course, it is also contingent on the males living alongside you if you're a woman treasuring those values.

It is one thing to guarantee a social condition by law, another to guarantee that all those who live under those laws will surrender to its justice. Human beings are flawed in many ways, among those is the inherent belief that seems to be sequestered deep within the inner psyche as a genetic inheritance that one gender is supreme over the other.

Tribal, clan and religious influences to the present day shape their societies to accept and believe that women are inferior to men and as such must naturally submit to men. Accorded all the rights of another kind of livestock, their potential as bearers of the new generation is bargained for by their menfolk, the ownership of which is seen as a fundamental guarantee of survival of his genes.

Which leads, in many societies, to brutal control measures like infibulation, a more bodily-invasive attempt of control than the chastity belts of an earlier era and invention. Tribal, clan and family honour are paramount, and a religion based on a dark age of nomadic tribal protection of possessions against the malign intentions of an opposing tribe uses power over females to dishonour to consolidate their customary control over women.

In Kingston, Ontario, a trial holding the Shafia family of father, wife, eldest son to account for the planned honour killing of the family's three teen-age daughters and the father's first wife, is just winding down. Witnesses for the Crown have testified to the horrors of daily life for three girls whose ambition it was to escape the stifling, brutal confines of their family life.

The kind of honour accepted through the demands of Sharia law or fundamentalist Hinduism and the debasement and subjugation of females in a country like Afghanistan or India has been imported to Canada. Canada has seen a series of such honour killings, from teen-age girls in rebellion against the paterfamilias-clan-imposed 'laws' of submission, to those of wives killed by husbands.

It is beyond belief sometimes how implacably cruel, and miserably ignorant human beings can be in their sub-human relations to one another.