JANE HUTCHEON: In a working-class suburb of Jordan’s capital, there’s an
ordinary family with an extraordinary tale.Music
These children look happy enough, but their mother is dead, killed by their father. Now they’re cared for by his sister Eitidal, while he’s overseas on business.
The family accused their mother, Hanan, of having an affair,
so to preserve the family honour, her husband Anwar murdered her.
Their twelve year old Sanad – who was six then - witnessed the whole thing.
SANAD: My father took out his gun and shot Uncle Wa’el once, but he got away. Then he went to my mother and asked her why she’d been with Wa’el and she said “we love each other and we will get married – and it’s none of your business!” Then I came back from school and I saw my father shoot my mother. After that he surrendered to a traffic policeman.
She deserved to die… it was right. What my father did was right.
JANE HUTCHEON: Sanad’s Aunty Eitidal agrees.
EITIDAL: It’s not only good for us – it’s the same for all the people who have an honour case. It’s good to kill who do wrong things – it benefits everyone. And traditionally, everyone supports it. We say that when your finger becomes full of puss, you cut it off.
Music
JANE HUTCHEON: Jordan is one of the most liberal countries in the Arab world.
Here, women are better educated than many of their Middle Eastern counterparts and they can vote. Officially, there’s equality between the sexes.But if there’s a glaring weakness – it’s in the punishment for those who kill in the name of honour. Using honour as a defence, a man can serve just six months in jail instead of a 15-year term for murder.
Journalist Lima Nabil began investigating the plight of Arab women seventeen years ago. To her amazement, she found teenage girls held in prison simply for their protection.
LIMA NABIL: So I started talking with them,
I still remember, the first one, she was thirteen years old, raped by her father. She was in prison, he was outside.When it comes to the honour crimes, a woman is always, always, always a victim and the woman is always the one to blame, even if she’s innocent.
JANE HUTCHEON: Lima makes regular visits to Jordan’s first women’s shelter – one of just a handful.
It’s a short-term solution for someone at risk of domestic abuse.
LIMA NABIL: Hello. How are you? Are you Lujein?
JANE HUTCHEON: Lujein is a 23 year old runaway. She’s one of twelve children in a religious family. Since she left school five years ago, her father has forced her to stay at home until he finds her a suitable husband. It’s not the first time she’s run away.
LUJEIN: My father is hard – it’s his nature.
LIMA NABIL: He’s just hard?
LUJEIN: And at home, no one could bear to see me or to talk to me – as if I’m a stranger to my own family. Imagine feeling such longing while you’re with own family.JANE HUTCHEON: In search of comfort and affection, Lujein became romantically involved with a man. Her father was furious.
Finally, you can’t imagine how emotionally tired I am. They had to spend last night taking care of me.
LIMA NABIL: What can you do? Hope it’s the beginning of a new life, and we come to visit you. And we’ll laugh and have fun – have fun and laugh. Hope it’s good and your future is better. God willing.
LUJEIN: God willing.
JANE HUTCHEON: Lujein has no choice now but to return home. She has nowhere else to go.
Lima Nabil has dealt with dozens of cases like Lujein’s; domineering fathers treating powerless daughters like prisoners.
Many of these cases end in the tragedy of an honour killing, or at the very least broken lives.MusicIn this neighbourhood, everyone knows why Sharukh and her family
moved here.
SHARUKH: Hello, how are you?
JANE HUTCHEON: Every afternoon, she fetches five-year old son Ahmed from the school bus. Sharukh isn’t her real name. It means ‘sunrise’. She chose it to signify a new beginning.
This is her second marriage. She and her new husband have three children. But she was forced to leave six behind with her first husband. They struggle to make ends meet, but she’s glad just to be alive.Sharukh had a miserable upbringing with a father who mentally and physically abused her.
SHARUKH: He started chasing me around and picking up things like the mop and a portable gas cooker. That’s the last thing I remember – when I got up I had three stitches in my neck.
JANE HUTCHEON: She thought life would get better after she left home, but it didn’t. It only got worse.MusicSharukh’s ordeal began more than 25 years ago when at the age of 17, she was forced to
marry a man she didn’t like. She had six children with him, but he divorced her three times, on the third time, returning her to her parents. But living with an abusive father was more than she could bear and she ran away several times.
At one stage she was locked inside a bathroom for five years.
JANE HUTCHEON: How did you manage to survive for all that time, living in something as small and awful as a bathroom?
Anyone confined to a bathroom for five years will go crazy. But God helped me a lot.
I started learning the Koran, praying, fasting and reading a lot of religious texts. After that, I didn’t feel the pressure so much.
JANE HUTCHEON: The police were eventually summoned and for her own safety, they said, she was put in prison. After being released, her father and brothers finally decided she had brought the family enough embarrassment.
SHARUKH: My brother Hussein, who’s a university graduate, told my father to shoot me. My father started shooting, and finished all the bullets in the first gun. Then another brother, who works in one of the hospitals, asked my father to start with another gun as he noticed I was still alive – and told my father to aim at my head, so I would die.
JANE HUTCHEON: Sharukh was rushed to hospital with six gunshot wounds. Incredibly though, she lived.
Her father was arrested, but relatives convinced her to drop the charges against him, which she did.
SHARUKH: If I didn’t drop the charges we’d both still be jail today.
JANE HUTCHEON: She thought it would buy her freedom. Now she wants revenge.SHARUKH: Help me punish him. I want to sue him! I want to punish him for a childhood that I didn’t have – his accusations of loose-living in my teenage years – and for all the awful accusations I had to live with for 43 years. I’m completely ostracised – I don’t have a family… my brothers hate me for no reason.
JANE HUTCHEON: Has anyone from your family ever been punished for what they’ve done to you?
SHARUKH: No one can punish them. This is our law – your father is your God.
JANE HUTCHEON: It’s a lesson young boys like Sanad learn early.
JANE HUTCHEON: Do you miss your mother? Why?
SANAD: Because she loved Wa’el, and not my father.
JANE HUTCHEON: Do you think she deserved to die?SANAD: Yes.JANE HUTCHEON: Is that what your father and Auntie said?SANAD: No. It’s what I alone think.
Music
JANE HUTCHEON: Eitidal Shalami clearly remembers the day six years ago when her brother Anwar killed his wife Hanan. They were first cousins.
But the only regret she has is that her brother served almost seven years in prison – more than fourteen times the usual punishment for an honour killing.
EITIDAL: It wasn’t fair. The law of the government is six months – but because Hanan’s mother charged him, he was “poisoned” for seven and a half years. Honour cases in Islamic countries are well known – it’s only six months in prison.
JANE HUTCHEON: What if a woman isn’t guilty but dies anyway. As a woman yourself, doesn’t this make you angry?EITIDAL: If she’s innocent, I would certainly feel sorry for her. I would sympathise with her because she is innocent. But there isn’t one honour crime committed where the woman was innocent – it didn’t happen – it’s impossible.
Music
JANE HUTCHEON: In the process of Jordan’s modernisation, there’s an inevitable clash between new and old.Islamic conservatives believe imitating Western culture can corrupt society, while many young, wealthy Jordanians cast off traditional values which oblige a woman to control her public behaviour.But virtually without exception, society regards misbehaviour by a woman as more damaging to a family’s honour than misbehaviour by a man.
I’ve come to a private university to hear what the younger generation thinks. They’re all aged between 21 and 23 – from wealthier families.I asked the men how they would react if they discovered their wife had cheated on them.
SALAM: If I knew that my wife has cheated me, I’ll kill her simply. Yes.
JANE HUTCHEON: So it that the view that most people would have in Jordan?
SALAM: 99.999 per cent in Jordan is like this.
BANDAR: I disapprove – no. If any treachery happens, there is the law. People go to the law. We are not barbarians, okay.
SALAM: In Islam if some girl not married and she had some sexual relationship, she can be punished, okay. But if she is married, Islam says that she has to be killed.
RULA: Usually men in our society, they choose from religion what they want. Okay, like marrying four women, about killing their women. But look at them, they don’t do anything that religion says, so they choose what they want.
JANE HUTCHEON: What if someone accused you of doing something wrong?
Do you think you could defend yourself if you were accused of some kind
of wrongdoing?
TAMARA: I guess not. It’s hard to defend yourself in this society.
JANE HUTCHEON: In Sharukh’s home, her husband Khaled treats her well and her new life is a success. But
nothing can bring back her wasted youth or heal the scars from an abusive upbringing.
SHARUKH: He destroyed my childhood May God not forgive him for what he did to me. I had no life as a child or a teenager. I didn’t live at all!If a girl is raised well and has a wise father, then nothing like an honour crime will happen – but if you are saying that honour crimes will end through generations, I don’t believe this to be true. A father raises his son, like my brothers – and they can raise their sons and grandsons to hold the same principle. Then it’s impossible to change the principle.
Music
JANE HUTCHEON: Lujein is preparing to leave the women’s shelter to return to her family.
WOMAN: We’re all with you. Take care of yourself.
LUJEIN: If God is willing.
JANE HUTCHEON: Her only hope is to marry a husband kind, gentle and open-minded enough to treat her
as an equal.But in a society where men regard family honour as literally a matter of life and death, there are no guarantees.Music
ordinary family with an extraordinary tale.Music
These children look happy enough, but their mother is dead, killed by their father. Now they’re cared for by his sister Eitidal, while he’s overseas on business.
The family accused their mother, Hanan, of having an affair,
so to preserve the family honour, her husband Anwar murdered her.
Their twelve year old Sanad – who was six then - witnessed the whole thing.
SANAD: My father took out his gun and shot Uncle Wa’el once, but he got away. Then he went to my mother and asked her why she’d been with Wa’el and she said “we love each other and we will get married – and it’s none of your business!” Then I came back from school and I saw my father shoot my mother. After that he surrendered to a traffic policeman.
She deserved to die… it was right. What my father did was right.
JANE HUTCHEON: Sanad’s Aunty Eitidal agrees.
EITIDAL: It’s not only good for us – it’s the same for all the people who have an honour case. It’s good to kill who do wrong things – it benefits everyone. And traditionally, everyone supports it. We say that when your finger becomes full of puss, you cut it off.
Music
JANE HUTCHEON: Jordan is one of the most liberal countries in the Arab world.
Here, women are better educated than many of their Middle Eastern counterparts and they can vote. Officially, there’s equality between the sexes.But if there’s a glaring weakness – it’s in the punishment for those who kill in the name of honour. Using honour as a defence, a man can serve just six months in jail instead of a 15-year term for murder.
Journalist Lima Nabil began investigating the plight of Arab women seventeen years ago. To her amazement, she found teenage girls held in prison simply for their protection.
LIMA NABIL: So I started talking with them,
I still remember, the first one, she was thirteen years old, raped by her father. She was in prison, he was outside.When it comes to the honour crimes, a woman is always, always, always a victim and the woman is always the one to blame, even if she’s innocent.
JANE HUTCHEON: Lima makes regular visits to Jordan’s first women’s shelter – one of just a handful.
It’s a short-term solution for someone at risk of domestic abuse.
LIMA NABIL: Hello. How are you? Are you Lujein?
JANE HUTCHEON: Lujein is a 23 year old runaway. She’s one of twelve children in a religious family. Since she left school five years ago, her father has forced her to stay at home until he finds her a suitable husband. It’s not the first time she’s run away.
LUJEIN: My father is hard – it’s his nature.
LIMA NABIL: He’s just hard?
LUJEIN: And at home, no one could bear to see me or to talk to me – as if I’m a stranger to my own family. Imagine feeling such longing while you’re with own family.JANE HUTCHEON: In search of comfort and affection, Lujein became romantically involved with a man. Her father was furious.
Finally, you can’t imagine how emotionally tired I am. They had to spend last night taking care of me.
LIMA NABIL: What can you do? Hope it’s the beginning of a new life, and we come to visit you. And we’ll laugh and have fun – have fun and laugh. Hope it’s good and your future is better. God willing.
LUJEIN: God willing.
JANE HUTCHEON: Lujein has no choice now but to return home. She has nowhere else to go.
Lima Nabil has dealt with dozens of cases like Lujein’s; domineering fathers treating powerless daughters like prisoners.
Many of these cases end in the tragedy of an honour killing, or at the very least broken lives.MusicIn this neighbourhood, everyone knows why Sharukh and her family
moved here.
SHARUKH: Hello, how are you?
JANE HUTCHEON: Every afternoon, she fetches five-year old son Ahmed from the school bus. Sharukh isn’t her real name. It means ‘sunrise’. She chose it to signify a new beginning.
This is her second marriage. She and her new husband have three children. But she was forced to leave six behind with her first husband. They struggle to make ends meet, but she’s glad just to be alive.Sharukh had a miserable upbringing with a father who mentally and physically abused her.
SHARUKH: He started chasing me around and picking up things like the mop and a portable gas cooker. That’s the last thing I remember – when I got up I had three stitches in my neck.
JANE HUTCHEON: She thought life would get better after she left home, but it didn’t. It only got worse.MusicSharukh’s ordeal began more than 25 years ago when at the age of 17, she was forced to
marry a man she didn’t like. She had six children with him, but he divorced her three times, on the third time, returning her to her parents. But living with an abusive father was more than she could bear and she ran away several times.
At one stage she was locked inside a bathroom for five years.
JANE HUTCHEON: How did you manage to survive for all that time, living in something as small and awful as a bathroom?
Anyone confined to a bathroom for five years will go crazy. But God helped me a lot.
I started learning the Koran, praying, fasting and reading a lot of religious texts. After that, I didn’t feel the pressure so much.
JANE HUTCHEON: The police were eventually summoned and for her own safety, they said, she was put in prison. After being released, her father and brothers finally decided she had brought the family enough embarrassment.
SHARUKH: My brother Hussein, who’s a university graduate, told my father to shoot me. My father started shooting, and finished all the bullets in the first gun. Then another brother, who works in one of the hospitals, asked my father to start with another gun as he noticed I was still alive – and told my father to aim at my head, so I would die.
JANE HUTCHEON: Sharukh was rushed to hospital with six gunshot wounds. Incredibly though, she lived.
Her father was arrested, but relatives convinced her to drop the charges against him, which she did.
SHARUKH: If I didn’t drop the charges we’d both still be jail today.
JANE HUTCHEON: She thought it would buy her freedom. Now she wants revenge.SHARUKH: Help me punish him. I want to sue him! I want to punish him for a childhood that I didn’t have – his accusations of loose-living in my teenage years – and for all the awful accusations I had to live with for 43 years. I’m completely ostracised – I don’t have a family… my brothers hate me for no reason.
JANE HUTCHEON: Has anyone from your family ever been punished for what they’ve done to you?
SHARUKH: No one can punish them. This is our law – your father is your God.
JANE HUTCHEON: It’s a lesson young boys like Sanad learn early.
JANE HUTCHEON: Do you miss your mother? Why?
SANAD: Because she loved Wa’el, and not my father.
JANE HUTCHEON: Do you think she deserved to die?SANAD: Yes.JANE HUTCHEON: Is that what your father and Auntie said?SANAD: No. It’s what I alone think.
Music
JANE HUTCHEON: Eitidal Shalami clearly remembers the day six years ago when her brother Anwar killed his wife Hanan. They were first cousins.
But the only regret she has is that her brother served almost seven years in prison – more than fourteen times the usual punishment for an honour killing.
EITIDAL: It wasn’t fair. The law of the government is six months – but because Hanan’s mother charged him, he was “poisoned” for seven and a half years. Honour cases in Islamic countries are well known – it’s only six months in prison.
JANE HUTCHEON: What if a woman isn’t guilty but dies anyway. As a woman yourself, doesn’t this make you angry?EITIDAL: If she’s innocent, I would certainly feel sorry for her. I would sympathise with her because she is innocent. But there isn’t one honour crime committed where the woman was innocent – it didn’t happen – it’s impossible.
Music
JANE HUTCHEON: In the process of Jordan’s modernisation, there’s an inevitable clash between new and old.Islamic conservatives believe imitating Western culture can corrupt society, while many young, wealthy Jordanians cast off traditional values which oblige a woman to control her public behaviour.But virtually without exception, society regards misbehaviour by a woman as more damaging to a family’s honour than misbehaviour by a man.
I’ve come to a private university to hear what the younger generation thinks. They’re all aged between 21 and 23 – from wealthier families.I asked the men how they would react if they discovered their wife had cheated on them.
SALAM: If I knew that my wife has cheated me, I’ll kill her simply. Yes.
JANE HUTCHEON: So it that the view that most people would have in Jordan?
SALAM: 99.999 per cent in Jordan is like this.
BANDAR: I disapprove – no. If any treachery happens, there is the law. People go to the law. We are not barbarians, okay.
SALAM: In Islam if some girl not married and she had some sexual relationship, she can be punished, okay. But if she is married, Islam says that she has to be killed.
RULA: Usually men in our society, they choose from religion what they want. Okay, like marrying four women, about killing their women. But look at them, they don’t do anything that religion says, so they choose what they want.
JANE HUTCHEON: What if someone accused you of doing something wrong?
Do you think you could defend yourself if you were accused of some kind
of wrongdoing?
TAMARA: I guess not. It’s hard to defend yourself in this society.
JANE HUTCHEON: In Sharukh’s home, her husband Khaled treats her well and her new life is a success. But
nothing can bring back her wasted youth or heal the scars from an abusive upbringing.
SHARUKH: He destroyed my childhood May God not forgive him for what he did to me. I had no life as a child or a teenager. I didn’t live at all!If a girl is raised well and has a wise father, then nothing like an honour crime will happen – but if you are saying that honour crimes will end through generations, I don’t believe this to be true. A father raises his son, like my brothers – and they can raise their sons and grandsons to hold the same principle. Then it’s impossible to change the principle.
Music
JANE HUTCHEON: Lujein is preparing to leave the women’s shelter to return to her family.
WOMAN: We’re all with you. Take care of yourself.
LUJEIN: If God is willing.
JANE HUTCHEON: Her only hope is to marry a husband kind, gentle and open-minded enough to treat her
as an equal.But in a society where men regard family honour as literally a matter of life and death, there are no guarantees.Music