Women whose families want to kill them are put in prison by the government for their own safety and are not allowed to leave. They must be released into the custody of a male relative who must pay money as a guarantee he will not allow her to be killed. But this is only on paper. They can be legally bailed out, but in the majority of the cases it is because the family wants to kill them. In reality, even if they pay it doesn’t matter. A lot of times, the father will write a guarantee he is not going to harm his daughter and then somebody else kills her. I write about this because the women are kept in prison when it should be the other way around.
How long do these women stay in prison?
I have seen women who have been there for over 15 years. This is unfair. The majority of them have been in prison since they were teenagers. They have wasted their lives, their youth in prison. Some of them say they are already dead. Some think that if they leave they will start a new life, that their family has forgiven them. But of course, this is not the case. There have been between 20 and 40 women in the prison at one time. Half of them have been there long term.
There is no international organization working to help get these women out of the country?
One thing about this point. I think if this would be just a temporary solution it could be considered. There were cases of women who were helped by NGOs and were gotten abroad. But for me this is only a temporary solution. We need to solve this problem internally. If Jordan sends women abroad it means it is avoiding the problem. It’s not okay for a woman to travel safely outside but to die inside her own country.
I agree. But given the choice of spending 15 years in a prison cell—and I assume they are among real criminals—or getting an international organization to put together a system that gets these women out and into college abroad, get educated and eventually go back when it is safe for them to do so. And perhaps even be able to fight with others to change this system themselves. It is such a waste of life—that the victim should be imprisoned.
Exactly. That is something I have also been fighting for and advocating against. I try to highlight the lives of these women because for a long time, people did not know these women even existed.
There is a recent case in Israel where seven women from the same Arab family were killed because of so-called honor crimes. The girl’s mother and sister testified against the son/brother.
This is a precedent. It is very rare to have something like this happen.
Do you think your work had something to do with giving women such courage?
The media attention and the work I think it really paid off. I have been very consistent with how I report on these crimes, reporting on each case I hear about, each court verdict. I’ve written about the women who are put in prison for their own safety. I’ve been doing the same work for 15 years. As far as the women’s movement, the problem all over the world is that the work is seasonal. At one point there is excitement and they want to address honor crimes. Then other issues come up and they decide to talk about something else. The priorities here shifted, unfortunately, for many people since 2000, when the second Intifada started. Our group stopped working on honor crimes, got more involved in politics and what was going on in Palestine. Then there was 9/11, and after 9/11, the war on Iraq. But overall, I think the work has produced a lot of awareness.