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TITLE: Perilous Time in Palestinian Families as Siege Adds Pressure to Old Injustices |
AUTHOR: Suzanne Goldenberg |
PUB: The Guardian |
DATE: March 9, 2001 |
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The upheavals caused by the the intifada in the West Bank and Gaza have put an intolerable pressure on many Palestinian families, and women's groups believe that domestic violence is rising. "[It] has affected people mentally and emotionally," said Falak Khayyat, director of the Family Defence Society, which defied age-old traditions of burying such issues deep within the family to found the first shelter for battered Palestinian women in the West Bank city of Nablus. Calls to the society's advice line, which does not dare to advertise the refuge overtly, had doubled in recent months, she said. "We used to open our hotline until 2.30pm. Now we are open until midnight." In a heavily guarded villa on the slopes overlooking the town sit two women who managed to escape to this sanctuary in the hope of salvaging something of their lives. For nearly 40 years Fatima put up with an alcoholic husband who knocked out her front teeth; then she left him. Mariam ran away from her home in Gaza when her pregnancy began to show. For her it was a matter of survival: unmarried mothers have been put to death to cleanse what their relatives see as the family's honour. "I was confused and depressed and tired. I could not think," she said, cuddling her month-old baby son in the shelter's living room. "Now I am happy." The Israeli siege of Palestinian areas prevents more than 100,000 day labourers going to their jobs in Israel. Unemployment in the West Bank and Gaza is 38% and a third of Palestinians have dropped below the poverty line, living on less than #1.38 a day. The blockade, which has added to family tension, also prevents women in danger escaping. Ms Khayyat said she knew of at least nine women currently in need of shelter who had no way of reaching Nablus. Meanwhile the shelter is facing its own economic crisis. Funding from Oxfam Quebec and Oxfam Ireland will run out in a few days. The Palestinian Authority, which was paying some of the staff, has its own financial crisis. Some donors, including the European Union, are balking at handing more cash to a corrupt and incompetently run administration. Others are giving higher priority to programmes such as food aid for beleaguered Palestinian areas. The authority, which is struggling to pay its police force and civil servants, has no incentive to defy traditionalists by punishing domestic violence. "This is a superb time to kill a woman if you feel like killing her, because the police keep saying that now is not the time to look into this," said Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a criminologist who helped to train the shelter's staff. All these factors threaten the future of the shelter, whose very existence is an exercise in courage. In Palestinian society the notion of a shelter beyond the reach of a woman's relatives is taboo, and the Nablus refuge is largely kept secret for fear of it causing a social backlash. An earlier attempt to set up a women's refuge in Ramallah failed after city elders branded it a whorehouse. A similar refuge in Jordan is also kept secret. In the face of such resistance, taking in an unmarried mother such as Mariam could prove explosive - particularly in a conservative city like Nablus. In the course of her research, Dr Shalhoub-Kevorkian has uncovered 234 suspicious deaths in the West Bank alone between 1996 and 1998. She believes that they were "honour killings", the name given in the Arab world to the murder of young women who offend social norms. The killers are often close male relatives of their victim. In the police ledgers such deaths are not seen as murder. They are referred to obliquely as deaths due to "fate and destiny". "This is how the authorities nullify abuses," Dr Shalhoub-Kevorkian said. Such killings are only the most dramatic outward manifestation of how deep and powerful are the social forces that keep women trapped in dangerous situations. In Fatima's case, family life was cursed soon after her marriage at the age of 14 to a cousin. "I used to pray to god everyday that I would die. Ever since I got married, I wanted to leave, but then I had a daughter," she said. Nine children later she fled from her village near Jerusalem after her husband burned down the family home, and broke her arm. It took Ms Khayyat four years of stubbornly lobbying Yasser Arafat and his social affairs minister, Umm Jihad, to win support for the Nablus shelter, and she has been careful to get the active support of the city's most prominent male citizens on board: the local governor, Muslim sheikhs, and a Christian priest are on its advisory board. The shelter took in its first woman in August. Since then there have never been more than four women at a time in the villa, which is protected by barbed wire, an electric gate and television monitors. Prospective inmates were carefully screened, Ms Khayyat said, and the staff on the hotline explored less drastic ways of resolving family disputes. That, she admitted, could close off the option of a speedy escape from a dangerous situation, but the centre had little choice. "In our society," she said, "a mistake could destroy the whole family". END |