Although the experts assume that, in addition to general psychosocial stress, culture-specific and migration-related factors play a part in the criminal tendencies of migrants, there has not been much research done to date on the special situation of those persons committing honour killings. This study starts from the premise that these perpetrators have a patriarchal-religious mind-set and have developed a conception of “honour”. In connection with biographical stresses they are more willing to injure or kill other people if the values and standards they believe in are not respected. We interviewed 41 men with a Turkish background between 18and 35in Germany who had killed other persons who they thought had violated their concept of honour and who then had been convicted of murder or manslaughter (“honour killers”). The two control groups comprised 44 criminals with an ethnic Turkish background who were in prison on charges of using violence without causing death and 40 prisoners who had been convicted of murder or manslaughter for other reasons. To ascertain the respective motives for their actions, we used semistandardised interviews in jails. Compared to the control groups, the group of honour killers revealed significant differences as regards ethnicity and socialisation, structural violence in their country of origin and stresses within the family. We found a correlation between the parameters “reinforcement through the social milieu” and “costbenefit considerations”, “ancestry and socialisation” and “structural violence”. In the case of the honour killers we found strong patriarchalreligious cognitions with structural violence which triggered actionoriented and target-oriented aggression when the person concerned felt that the standards and values which he believed in, had been infringed.