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dying of shame

This article appears in the February 2001 issue of Reader's Digest magazine. I felt compelled to print it here because, as the article states, awareness about matters like these is very important in order for change to come about. I can speak on behalf of a lot of people in saying that what is described here is an awful practice that should be stopped as soon as possible. I hope you take the time to read it, and feel fortunate for your freedom.

    Dying Of
Shame

Women and girls are being
sacrificed to protect their families
from "dishonour"

By SALLY ARMSTRONG
From Chatelaine

Flirting was a costly mistake for Samera.  She was only 15 when her neighbours in Salfeet, a small Palestinian town on the West Bank, saw her chatting with a young man without a male chaperone.  Her family's honour was at stake; a marriage was quickly arranged.  By 16, she had a child.
Five years later, when she could stand the bogus marriage no longer, she bolted.  According to the gossips, she went from man to man as she moved from place to place.  Finally, in July 1999, her family caught up with her.  She was found stuffed down a well, her neck broken.
Her father told the coroner that she'd committed suicide.  But everyone knew that Samera was a victim of honour killing, murdered by her own family because her actions brought dishonour to their name.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a passionate advocate for Palestinian women's rights, knew it, too.  She marched into the coroner's office and demanded an autopsy.  Charges were laid against Samera's mother and brother, but Shalhoub-Kevorkian knew they'd never stick.  Here in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority law allows honour killing.  Samera's parents are walking the streets of their neighbourhood with their heads held high, relieved that the family honour has been restored.
Samera's story is one of dozens Shalhoub-Kevorkian has been tracking from her cramped office at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  The 41-year-old criminologist, social worker and assistant professor is taking cases such as Samera's to court, demanding answers.  In doing so, she's cracking a code of silence surrounding an ancient custom practised throughout the Middle East by both Christian and Muslim Arabs.
Women who've been raped, who are judged promiscuous or who refuse an arranged marriage are being bashed over the head, shot, choked to death, mutilated.  On the West Bank and in Gaza, some 23 Palestinian women were victims of honour killings in 1999.  Hundreds more may be in hiding.  Meanwhile, a sisterhood of Arab women has banded together, defying the law while they lobby for change.
They've been accused of promoting promiscuity and destroying the traditional family by the forces that will lose power if the status quo is toppled.  The tribal chiefs, for example, would forfeit their role as cultural power brokers, and religious leaders would also have to bow to popular rule.  For activists such as Shalhoub-Kevorkian who've been shadow-boxing with political, cultural and religious forces for the past decade, this is the main event.  And millions of women are counting on them.

"Don't talk to me about honour killing," says Shalhoub-Kevorkian at the faculty club of the Hebrew University.  "The two words don't go together.  This is 'femicide', the killing of women."
Shalhoub-Kevorkian's work began with a hot line she set up in 1993, soon after one of her students told her that his cousin had been raped.  When she tried to help the girl, she discovered that no one wanted to know about it:  not her family, not even the hospital staff.  In fact, there were no shelters, no counselling services, no support whatsoever.
One of the first calls to the hot line came from a 15-year-old girl:  "When I was ten, I was alone in the house when our neighbour, Wajeeh, knocked on the door wanting to borrow some sugar.  I opened the door because we borrow back and forth all the time.  But he wrestled me to the ground, pulled down my skirt and pants and did something very painful to me.  While he was on his way out, my mother and eldest brother came home.  They both started beating me, yelling, 'It's best for you to die!' "
The child became a prisoner in her home until she was 14 and old enough to be married off to Wajeeh.  She never saw her playmates or attended school again and to this day blames herself for opening the door.  It's cases like this one that propelled Shalhoub-Kevorkian to take on the system and to create the social unit at the Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in Jerusalem.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian has paid a price for her high profile.  A few days after she commented publicly on the case of a 17-year-old girl who'd been gang-raped, her car was stopped on the road between the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem.  Three men grabbed her by the throat, beat her with sticks driven with nails and fled.  She got the message but refuses to back down.

The poisonous root of honour killing is centuries old, dating to the pre-Islamic era when men were encouraged to bury infant daughters alive to avoid the possibility that they would grow up to dishonour the family.
The practice has nothing to do with the Koran [the Muslim Bible], and according to scholars of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad called for an end to it.  Instead, it has burgeoned and sent deadly tentacles into much of Asia, where in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, women are stoned to death for infidelity.
In the process, it has created both a legacy of fear for females and a bizarre duality that sees women on the one hand as fragile creatures who need protection and, on the other, as evil Jezebels from whom society needs protection.  This millstone of an ancient culture casts the male as the sole protector of the female, so he must have total control of her.  If his protection is violated, he loses honour, because either he failed to protect her or he failed to bring her up correctly.
The law in the West Bank and Jordan states that killing a woman is justifiable under the "honour rationale" when a man finds his wife or a female relative fornicating with another man.
Incredibly, it's all tied to public knowledge.  If the "crime" is not disclosed, there's no pressure to take action.  But if it's made public, a girl's life becomes the tool to censor the gossips and rescue the family's honour.
Death is only one form of femicide, says Shalhoub-Kevorkian.  Living with the threat of death for your entire life is another.  Femicide comes in four forms.  First, there is the unspoken threat - social control such as keeping a girl out of school or forcing her into a marriage.  The second is the active threat to kill.  The third is the act of trying to kill a daughter:  West Bank institutions bear tragic witness to survivors of murderous attacks.  And the fourth is murder.
Getting away with it is disturbingly easy.  Dr. Jalal Aljabri, director of the Forensic Medical Centre for the Palestinian Authority in East Jerusalem, says he hardly ever sees a case in which honour killing is the official cause of death.  "In our culture, everybody knows but nobody says.  I get cases that say the cause of death is a firearm injury.  I know inside what really happened, but what can I do?"
His counterpart in Jordan, Dr. Hani Jahshan, recounts case after case of women who have turned up on his autopsy table, victims of honour killings.  "Women are brought to me to be examined after a sexual assault.  I tell their parents they are innocent, but a few weeks later I see them again, dead."  The crime isn't about rape or murder.  The crime is loss of chastity.
In 1999 and again in 2000, several organizations joined ranks to campaign against honour killing.  After collecting more than 16,000 signatures, the campaign dared to demand that Jordan's government change the law, making sentences for honour killing commensurate with those for murder.  Their plea was twice rejected by the Lower House of the Jordanian Parliament.  They are now hoping that public awareness in Jordan and international pressure will help their campaign to change the law.  But the campaign's legal advisor, Jordanian lawyer Asma Khader, knows changing the law isn't enough.  "We need to send a cultural message to the people that this isn't accepted anymore."
The public-awareness campaign will need to include the very young, since boys and girls alike are taught that the hymen is the centre of the family's honour.  Dr. Salwa Al-Najjab, an obstetrician/gynecologist in Ramallah who is also on the board of the Women's Centre, says, "I was just 11 when my mother told me about the hymen being like a glass:  If it's broken, it can never hold water again."
There's someone at her clinic every day seeking information about the hymen.  People here still believe that a woman must bleed after intercourse on her wedding night for proof of her virginity.  Another doctor says:  "If I'm asked to examine a girl to check if her hymen is in place, I always say it is.  Why would I say otherwise if I know they will kill her?"

It's a week before Christmas Eve when Shalhoub-Kevorkian and I leave Jerusalem to drive to a meeting of the board of the Women's Centre in Ramallah.  The twinkling decorations and the robes of the priests and mullahs are a poignant reminder of the origins of this holy land.  But as we drive by the Dung Gate to the Old City, Shalhoub-Kevorkian stops the car and says:  "See the village by the gate?  That's Silwan.  In October three women were killed in that village for so-called honour crimes.  Now, even very little girls are scared to death."
In Ramallah the women gather in a hotel meeting room.  They go through an agenda that's aimed at establishing shelters, new laws and empowerment for women and girls.  Outside, as the sun drops over a rocky hill in ancient Palestine, the wailing of the mullah calls the people to prayer.
This is Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic year.  While Muslims fast in Ramallah and Christians find their way to Bethlehem from Jerusalem, the women in the room upstairs are struggling to save the lives of women whose men are at prayer.