That Takes Ovaries! (28 page)

Sure enough, we got to school and it was like a dressing room changing party in the girls’ lavatory. Soon there were several dozen of us wearing pants. “Any girls wearing pants.

“Any girls wearing pants, please put skirts on immediately or you will be sent home. Your parents will be called…
blah, blah, blah,”
the principal said over the loudspeaker during homeroom. A foolish move on his part: Anyone who hadn’t yet heard about the revolt sure did then.

As instructed, we filed out of homeroom, and had a second party in the girls’ bathroom.

Probably two hundred girls crammed into the bathrooms to change that morning. Some even came to school wearing pants (it was winter, after all). I don’t remember being forced back into skirts that third day of the rebellion.
This is great,
I thought.
Maybe something can really change here.

Who knows how many girls wore pants that day; at least several hundred.

I’m not sure who came up with the idea—me, Eda, or Roberta—but at lunchtime we started spreading the word down the long tables that we were going to stage a walkout the next day and hold a sit-down strike in the parking lot!”
Psst.
The dress code has got to go. Pass it on.”

Word spread quickly. Some kids just liked the idea of getting out of classes for an hour, but a core group of us looked at this from a purely political point of view. Equal rights for girls were important to us. Only this time we wouldn’t have to skip school to attend the protest.

What we didn’t know was that news of our plan had spread to Harry—and beyond.

We arrived to find stern-looking adults stationed up and down the corridors at regular intervals on each of the four floors of our school. (Today, over thirty years later, I can’t recall exactly who those adults were. Perhaps teachers. Maybe parents. My usually crystal-clear memory wants to say it was the
cops.
Could it have been?)
“Oh my god,”
I whispered to Roberta. “They’re taking us seriously.” I was completely shocked, but, like others, undeterred.

The set time for the walkout neared. It was a cold day, cold enough that we could not just leave without getting our coats … from our lockers … where the authoritative adults were posted. We prepared to move toward those lockers when suddenly Curmudgeon Harry’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker: “Anyone caught leaving school will be suspended.” (Not that that would have stopped Eda and me.) “This will not happen,” he continued, “you are not going to walk out …
blah, blah, blah.”
Then he added, “We will be holding both PTA and school board meetings over the weekend to reexamine the issue of the school dress code.”

Eda, Roberta, and I smiled at one another across the classroom.
We’d done it.

The walkout never happened. It didn’t need to.

It made the papers. A junior high school filled with more than two thousand eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-olds about to hold a walkout? How could it not?

I was in the papers again. This time the article said the school board had met and the dress code rule mandating girls wear skirts had been officially abolished.

We showed up Monday and that was it. The entire school was in pants. We had taken a stand and made a change.

Shortly after our town’s “skirts-only” rule was abolished, the Greater Boston School District dismantled theirs. Then New York City did, too. Then Los Angeles. I don’t know if our actions, and people reading about them in the newspapers, caused this, or if other people were taking similar steps simultaneously, but in the absence of anyone’s telling me otherwise, I feel okay saying
we’d wanted to make a change for a day and we made a change for a country.
All before our first periods.

When a murder occurs in Jordan, they do not give out the victim’s name or address. So when I walked through a poor and crowded suburb outside our capital, Amman, navigating sandy, hilly, unpaved roads, I was not exactly sure where I’d end up. Figuring everyone knew everyone’s business in this neighborhood, I stopped an older man on the street.

“I heard there was a crime here. A sixteen-year-old girl was killed by her oldest brother. Can you tell me the address?”

“Right there.” He pointed behind me to a barbershop.

“Do you know why she was killed?” I asked.

“Because her other brother had raped her.”

“You must be joking.”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” He nodded his head, offering no look of shock to match mine.

“There must be something wrong.”

“No, that’s what happened.”

It was an old barbershop with two chairs. The barber sat on one; two men stood nearby. I walked in, angry but cautious, and without delay asked about the girl.

“Who told you? How do you know about this?” the men responded in a
how-dare-you-ask
tone.

“It was in the newspaper. Just a few lines,” I answered.

When they said they were her uncles, I sat down, told them I was a reporter, and launched in: “Why was she killed?”

“She was not a good girl,” one uncle snapped, as if that would justify a killing.

But I knew the truth from the man in the street. Now I wanted it from them. I pushed with more questions. Finally, one decided there was no reason to hide the truth: “Her brother raped her.”

That was all I needed to hear. “So why did you kill
her?
Why
did you punish the victim? Why didn’t you punish the brother?”

To those outside our culture my questions may have seemed presumptuous. But by then I understood enough about so-called “honor crimes” to know that though the uncles hadn’t actually slit her throat (her oldest brother had done that), they had
plotted
the execution. That is how it is usually done: by family decision. Now, much to their repugnance, a
woman
was asking about this crime of honor.

The uncles looked at each other, haughtily amused by my questions. One asked the other, “Do you think we killed the wrong person?”

“No, no, relax; we killed the right one.”

These are words I will never forget: words that still make my blood burn.

“She seduced her brother. She tarnished the family’s honor and deserved to die. That is why we killed her.”

“Why would she seduce her
brother
when there are dozens of men on the street?” I openly argued with them.

Fed up with me, and turning more aggressive, they shot back: “Why are you here, why do you care? Why aren’t you dressed in the traditional robe? Why aren’t you married? Oh, you studied in the United States?” These accusations, fired like bullets, translated to one thing: Like their niece, I was not a good girl.

Indeed I
had
worn nontraditional clothes—jeans and sneakers—on this murder investigation, just in case something went wrong and I had to take off fast. I figured now was a good time to leave. Anyway, I already had my story.

In 1994, when I was twenty-six and investigating this girl’s death for my newspaper, the
Jordan Times,
I never imagined her sad story would instigate my becoming a national voice for the mostly poor victims of so-called honor killings. What is a crime of honor? It is when a male takes the life of his female relative because, in the family’s opinion, she has tarnished their reputation by supposedly getting involved in “immoral behaviors.”

Though honor killings are a violation of human rights and a violation of all major faiths, including Jordan’s predominant Islamic religion, many Arab people ignore the killings and pretend they do not exist. Or they justify the act, as one killer did with me: “This is our culture. If I did not do it, I would shame my family. Blood cleanses honor.”

Sometime after that disturbing incident at the barbershop, I went to the courthouse to investigate further. I sifted through legal paperwork and testimonies to understand the case’s circumstances, the victim, and the suspect. Then I rushed to my newspaper with all these facts circulating in my mind. Trying to be objective and at the same time exposing the brutality and unjust sentencing, I wrote my second-ever news report on honor killings.

I learned astonishing things investigating those early articles, such as that women are often killed under the pretense of honor, when in reality their families murder them because of baseless rumors, suspicion, incest they want to hide, inheritance manipulation, or simply because females are considered a burden on families. I learned that even though premeditated murder is usually punished by life in prison or death, due to Jordan’s laws some honor-crime killers get only two- to seven-year sentences. Many get even more shockingly short sentences—
three to six months!
Another discovery I made was that women who are under threat of, or those who survive, a murder attempt by their families for “immoral behaviors” are themselves indefinitely imprisoned by the authorities, ostensibly for protection. However, a woman cannot
choose
to leave prison, nor bail herself out. And if her family bails her out, it is likely because they plan to kill her. I have met women who have been locked up for eight years, with no end in sight. Everywhere else in the world the
aggressor
is put behind bars, not the victim.

I was angered and distressed: Women-killers were getting away with murder, and women’s human rights were being ignored. I decided to expose these injustices through my articles.
I hoped that one day someone would hear me and be just as enraged.

I was heard, all right. Since my first of many news reports on this taboo topic, the newspaper has received numerous supportive letters. Then, as time passed, as the issue (and e-mail) became more prominent in Jordan, the negative comments started coming in. They questioned my motives. “Why are you reporting on honor killings?” they asked. “You are …”

“encouraging sexual freedom and promiscuity among women.”

“backed by the West, and aiming to destroy the morals of our people.”

“imposing Western values on our conservative society.”

“tarnishing the country’s image by exposing our dirty laundry abroad.”

And my favorite: “a radical feminist, seeking fame through these news reports.”

One high-up official, a woman, yelled at my editor: “You should stop Rana Husseini. She is exaggerating. These things do not happen here!”

As before, these words became fire burning inside me. Instead of making me stop, they kept me going. I was determined to prove the killings happened, even in the face of anonymous e-mail threats, such as “Stop writing about this issue or you will be ‘visited’ by someone at your work or home.”

I am not scared. I know what I am doing is right, and when you fight for something that’s right, you shouldn’t be scared. I know the people and the government must be held accountable for these women’s deaths. All should bear the responsibility of ensuring women’s safety and their right to life.

I have argued this point with judges—carefully, of course. The judiciary is one of the most respected institutions in our country. You can’t really question or accuse them of anything. But when a man who had killed his sister (because she was raped) received a six month sentence for this premeditated murder, I knocked on the office door of a judge from the trial and we
calmly “chatted” off the record. The judge knew me and had seen me on TV, fighting for women’s rights.

“Why did you give that murderer such a lenient sentence? The girl was raped. It’s not her fault.”

“The defendant is a product of our culture. He was pressured by society and his family to take such actions.”

Clearly, the light punishment showed the defendant was not the only one who was a product of our culture. “There is something wrong here,” I told the judge. “These verdicts do not value women’s lives.”

He paused. I could see the conversation had an impact.

Now, the impact I see is nationwide. The personal accusations have not stopped, but in the past seven years of my reporting, lecturing, speaking on local, national, and international TV, appearing in documentaries worldwide, winning human rights awards, and earning international recognition, I have also seen real change. A group of us formed a grassroots organization, the National Jordanian Campaign to Eliminate so-called Crimes of Honor. We collected an unprecedented fifteen thousand signatures, calling for the abolishment of specific laws that discriminate against women, and presented them to decision makers and the Parliament. We also held Jordan’s first march for women’s rights, and five thousand people came. With the support of the royal family, there is now a growing movement demanding a guarantee of justice, freedom, and the right to life for women in my country.