PALESTINE - DOMESTIC VIOLENCE - HONOR
KILLINGS - CALL FOR STRONGER LAWS AGAINST IMPUNITY
(from the IPS Service)
Many
Palestinian women face high levels of domestic violence. Credit: Jillian
Kestler-D'Amours/IPS.
- After the brutal
murder of a Palestinian woman in late July in a busy Bethlehem marketplace, local human rights groups are
pushing for stronger reforms to stem violence against women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“We have problems
with the existing laws,” Maysoun Ramadan, director of the Mehwar Centre, the
West Bank’s only women’s shelter told IPS. “I
think also we need to work more on raising awareness towards women’s rights. We
have a problem with the mentality, the culture, we have a lot of previous
constructions about women which need to be changed.”
Nancy Zaboun, a
27-year-old mother of three, was violently killed by her husband on Jul. 30 in
Bethlehem. The
murder took place after Zaboun left a divorce hearing. Her husband had
reportedly beaten her regularly over the course of their ten-year
marriage.
In 2010, the
Independent Commission for Human Rights documented the cases of nine women who
had been killed for this same reason – to preserve “family honour” – in the
occupied Palestinian territories.In addition to these
“honour killings,” a 2009 study published by the Gaza-based Palestinian Women’s
Information and Media Centre found that 67 percent of Palestinian women reported
being subjected to verbal violence on a regular basis, 71 percent to
psychological violence, 52.4 percent to physical violence and 14.5 percent to
sexual violence.
“When women come to
the shelter, they come in a very dramatic way. They have been abused and
subjected to different types of violence for many years. They lost their
confidence. They are sometimes aggressive, sometimes suicidal, sometimes in
depression. They have nightmares,” Ramadan told IPS.
“They are all the
time dependent on someone else and don’t believe in themselves. We try to help
them to see their capacities and to raise their motivation to break this
cycle.”
In January 2011, the
Palestinian Authority (PA) passed a National Strategy to Combat Violence against
Women for the period 2011-2019. The programme aims to create work training and
empowerment programmes for women, provide social support, and promote a legal
framework to stem violence.
“Our aim and target
was to eliminate all forms of violence, no matter what kind of violence, against
Palestinian women,” Rahiba Diab, the PA’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, told IPS
from her Ramallah office.
“There is a serious
commitment from the PA to support all the issues related to women, and not to
forget about the violence that comes from the critical political situation that
we’re living under as Palestinians,” Diab said.
In May 2011,
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a presidential decree to
suspend two laws: Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code of 1960, in effect in
the West Bank, and Article 18 of the British Mandatory law of 1936, which is
enforced in Gaza.
Article 340 granted a
man exemption from prosecution and reduced penalties for killing his wife or
other female relative if she is caught committing adultery. Article 18 provided
leniency for the same crime if a man can prove that he acted in order to
preserve his honour or the honour of others.
But various human
rights groups have pointed to the fact that the PA left other tenets of the law
in place, which allow for violence against women to continue
unpunished.
Articles 97, 98, 99,
and 100 of the Jordanian penal code deal with mitigating circumstances can be
used to justify “honour killings,” – Article 98 allows perpetrators to avoid
punishment if they can prove that they acted in a “state of
rage”.
“The existing law
still allows for women to be killed, still allows for impunity,” said Tahseen
Elayyan, head of the ‘Protection of women in armed conflicts’ project at the
Ramallah-based Al Haq human rights organisation.
“In order to take
practical steps towards protecting women, especially from the so-called honour
killing, the law must be changed, and perpetrators of this type of killing must
be held accountable,” Elayyan told IPS.
According to a report
released in December 2011 by the United Nations Economic and Social Council,
“high levels of poverty, unemployment and related frustration have contributed
to an increase in tension, and ultimately violence, within families” in the
occupied Palestinian territories.
This is especially
true in the Gaza Strip, where the increasingly harsh economic and social
conditions created by the Israeli siege have translated into violence against
women, according to Mona Shawa, head of the women’s unit at the Palestinian
Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza City.
“Gaza is under a closure.
The economic situation is very bad. There is a high percentage of poverty and
unemployment. There is frequent violence from Israeli attacks. All of these
circumstances affect the level of violence against women,” Shawa told
IPS.
She explained that
while putting laws in place to protect women against violence is a much-needed
first step, raising awareness on the rights of women and changing attitudes
within Palestinian society is crucial.
“Most important is
the community and the culture. We still have a culture which is based on
discrimination against women. We still have a culture that sees women as not
equal to men. This encourages violence against women,” Shawa
said.
“Working on that as a
government, as civil society…a joint effort must be made for all this to
change.”
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