A couple of weeks ago, at Dardashat, we tried to explore the issue of “value systems”. Lately, I am convinced that, in Jordan, we have a “crisis of values”. Anyway, we came up with different controversial scenarios and got our youth to analyze them in groups… we, then, chose some scenarios to be discussed in public. One of the scenarios was about a young woman whose brother sees her talking to a guy at the university. He starts watching her, only to discover that there is a platonic love relationship going on there. The scenario is complex, but it ends with the brother losing his temper one day and beating his sister brutally. A hypothetical scenario that is inspired by real life stories we deal with every now and then.

What I found interesting was that there was a lot of division in the group on the issue of abuse… some thought it was acceptable and some did not… but what I found fascinating was a comment by a young man telling us that most women in that group condoned the violence that took place in the scenario. They thought the girl deserved it… The student felt that women were harsher in their judgment than men. Many reasons were given, including respect, betrayal, family values, culture, traditions…needless to say, it was a thought provoking session.

The comment was casual, I did not expect it to linger…but it stuck in my head…day in and day out, it came back to me…it almost felt as if the comment dislodged a pebble that was buried deep in my subconscious… and for two weeks, I have had the strangest feeling that I was trying to remember something, but was not sure exactly what it was.

It hit me yesterday… a realization that is… women do condone violence against other women. For thousands of years, Mothers and sisters were standing by watching their daughters and sisters suffer abuse in silence. Many did not do anything to change it, some could not do anything to change it. However, some go as far as condoning it. I found an online study that shows that 42% of Qatari women condoned domestic violence in 2007. I found another study that shows that 87% of women condoned domestic violence in Jordan in 2004…. I guess Emad Hajjaj was as shocked by the numbers that he created a cartoon about it.  There is an improvement… but the numbers are still staggering.

Before delving into exploring real stories I would like to pose a question to a few women around me… do women condone violence against other women? And if so, why do they? In a state of no rights, where people grow up in a culture and education system that does not promote the the respect of human rights… and where, the louder you are, the stronger you are, the more right you are.

 Heba, 29

 “In some cases, women deserve the punishment, therefore other women ignore the punishment.”

 Hana, 23

“They condone violence, because they are used to it”

 Layla, 42

“Fear of divorce or scandal. Women often don’t have a place to do and so chooses not say anything”

 Hana, 24

“women often justify violence against other women. It really depends on the culture. But most probably violence is accepted”

 Ala’a, 21

“ I would not condone it, I would fight it, because my brother makes mistakes too.”

 Suad, 20

“women feel that it is the man’s right to beat the woman”

 Sana’a, 20

“Women let it happen, don’t try to stop it out of fear, they feel that if something similar happens to them, no one will defend them, so they accept their fate silently.”

 In this context, I would like to share the stories of two women… Let’s call them Nina and Salma. (Some of the facts in the stories were changed in order to protect their identities) I shared these stories in different contexts before, however they come to mind to make a point.

Nina is an old friend. She is someone who played a key role in my life around 10 to 15 years ago. Nina grew up in the US. When she hit a certain age, the family decided to come back to Jordan. She was a very free spirited person. However there was some mysterious darkness about her. We were close friends, and the more I knew her, the more I realized there was something I could not understand… one day she told me her life was in danger, I immediately assumed she was seeking attention, she was the type. But she showed me bruises all over her body.

I pushed her to tell me what was going on, and she admitted that her maternal grandfather was sexually abusing the girls in the family. The thing is, it was a dark secret that was known to every family member but no one spoke about it. When Nina became restless and could not shut up anymore, her mother decided it was time to shut her up. At some point, the mother was asking her brothers to kill her in order to preserve “the family honor”. Nina had enough wit to save her own and her sister’s life…They survived that difficult patch and ended up leaving the country with the support of many good individuals. Nina’s relationship with their family has been sour ever since her mother tried to get rid of her.

Nina’s mother is a woman who stood by watching her daughter being abused by her father in silence… she did not only try to stand up for or stop it, but she tried to shut her up in order not to stop it herself. In the process of leaving the country, Nina was consulting a counselor. In one of the visit he told us something I thought was interesting. “Most probably the mother was abused herself, he could not stop it as a girl and so she accepted it in silence, in her mind she wonders if I could accept it, why can’t my daughter?” in another session, he addressed Nina’s anger towards her mother by explaining that the mother did not hate her, she wanted to get rid of her, because she could not deal with her own failure to protect her….

Salma’s mother on the other hand moved heaven and hell to protect her daughter from a similar fate. Salma’s brother was fiddling with her mobile phone when he found a message that he could not fathom…it was from a man! In the absence of the father, the brother went to his uncles to rally them to protect the “family honor”. The mother told the family that she would burry them one by one, starting with the brother if they went as far as touching one hair on her daughter’s head. Salma survived. The family could not commit their heinous crime against the daughter because of the mother. They could not dare.

Truthfully, I believe self preservation; fear and other complex feelings kick in to stop women from protecting their womenfolk. However, I also think that sometimes women feel that these crimes are justified. I believe that number of crimes would definitely decrease if women stopped condoning crimes and started standing up for themselves and their daughters and sisters.

On that note, I leave you in peace… and the hope that we, women, would be grated enough wisdom to admin our weakness and enough strength to change them.

Getting e exposed to the taxi experience in the last few weeks reminded me of the agony that led to buying the car in the first place.

On Wednesday, I was running late for the 7iber event that was created around the Tachtical tech film,  was about to start and I had the film with me. I truly needed to be there on time. I had to use a taxi…

The next two paragraphs are truly unimportant. They state the conversation with the taxi driver. So you can simply skip them if you are not in the mood for details.

Destiny sent this strange fellow my way… an old dirty dude, who started a strange conversation with me. He started talking about a woman that he knew… it seemed to me that he was obsessed with her. He was telling me how she uses his services every now and then, and how much she loved and trusted him. He explained her pattern in detail. She visited “her uncle” every now and then with a whisky bottle… she went at 11 and then called the taxi to pick her at 3 or 4 AM. Sometimes, she called him “uncle” and sometimes “cousin”.

One day, she got pregnant with her absent husband who lives in the states, and when her time came to give birth, she was alone. But Mr. Taxi came to the rescue…Sadly the baby died, but Mr. Taxi was too smart… he noticed that baby looked like the man she called her uncle!

Mr. Taxi went on and on piling a detail upon a detail, using bad words and descriptive adjectives… I did not feel safe being in that taxi, but felt less safe asking him to stop. What if I offended him by asking him to stop? What if I implanted an idea by asking to stop?…many what ifs raced through my head. The guy was clearly mentally unstable… and the only option I felt I had then was to humor him and listen to his disgusting tale about his prostitute.

When we stop a taxi, we are, practically, getting in the car with a perfect stranger. Someone we don’t know anything about, we can’t predict his moods, his ethics, his next move. I am not saying that we should know public transportation drivers on a personal level… but in the case of a taxi, it is two people in a car alone.

When in a taxi, no one knows where you are. It is not like you are using the services of a registered company, if you disappear, the people in the office will know where to find you. It is not like you can complain to some sort of an office if this guy did or said something inappropriate… because, usually a taxi is operated by a guy and his brother in law, or in the best case with his cousin…ya3ni, if a taxi driver killed someone for example, they would be the people he would call to hide the body. (To use an extreme scenario example of course).

So all that makes me wonder if taxi drivers are the safest transportations mode, especially for women?
By the way lack of reliable and safe transportation was named as the number one deterrent for women job seekers  in a study that was conducted by a project I managed a few years ago. I expected any reason, but not this one.

Using public transportation is extremely expensive… women who make the minimum wage spend most of their salary on taxis and buses… especially in rural areas and in the suburbs where public transportation does not make it. But things do not stop there;Fathers, husbands and brothers do not feel that it is safe for their women folk to get in cars with perfect strangers. honestly… i don’t blame them… i don’t feel safe myself.

I think, probably, this is one of the most debated questions in the history of human kind.  Men and women are all curious about the differences between them, but in reality what they are curious about is: which sex is more capable? Men or women?

Last week N-Man said a typical male comment in a moment of anger. He empathizes with Saudis for not allowing women to drive! Naturally, I found the comment to be sexist. I tried to argue that this is a myth, but obviously the male ego is much larger than any logical arguments. Therefore, we started an experiment; while driving together we would count the number of weighty mistakes and check what the gender of the driver is.

We decided that we can only count violations that we see while we are in the same car, because each one of us was trying to prove a point.  Also, N-man excluded taxi drivers, which is as a shame really, since taxi drivers are a great source to prove that men are not better drivers than women!

Now the count was 6 to 8. Women made more mistakes in the few hours we were together in the car… I am sure that another hour would have balanced the accounts.

However, this was not the point, even though I would like you to go through a similar process and count driving mistakes and let us know about the number of mistakes made by women vs. men.

Anyway

I think the end result was that women’s mistakes were very different from men’s. Men tend to drive more aggressively than women and display their aggression in a direct manner. I feel their aggression is related to either impatience or to showing off… They break the law, they take silly and unnecessary risks… Women on the other hand, I don’t know… my feeling is that they make mistakes because they lack knowledge in road rules or possibly lack of experience? I mean they hesitate, they flinch, they don’t respect priorities. I don’t know…

I also think that men are conditioned socially to be drivers… they grow up loving cars and fantasizing about driving them… on a different note, women sometimes use the myth that they are worse drivers as an excuse to get by or break the laws…

I asked several people about their ideas on women and men driving skills:

N-man, driving for 9 years, Amman

“men, because women lack motor skills”

Feras, driving for 17 years, Madaba

“men drive better, they have more technical  skills.”

Abeer, driving for one year, Baqa’a

“Men, they know how to deal with the car better than women”

Hanan, driving for 10 years, Zarqa

“women, because they are more careful. Men tend to take more risks than women.”

Siham, driving for 2 years, Mafraq

“women, for a simple reason, in Mafraq, people to tend to ignore the road rules and laws. Women are more careful because they tend to be more fearful than men, so they need to be more careful. Therefore better drivers.”

Samer, driving for one year, Amman

“It is men of course, and if there are more accidents or mistakes by men. It is because the number of male drivers is much much higher than women. So proportionally, the number is higher”

Rami, driving for 10 years, Amman

“1000000% men! As a matter of fact, I am one of those who find myself cursing the person who gave a woman her license! Women think they own the street, they are slow, they don’t respect the rules.. they don’t use flash or indicators. Men might do the same, but we know what we are doing… women on the other hand are just confused!”

Last Saturday, a bunch of youth came to the organization, moslty because they were bored to death by their exams… They asked me to facilitate a conversation to answer the question de jour “ love or money?”

We organized the seats in a circle, but they naturally took two sides. Boys on one side of the room and girls on the other side… it was  going to turn into one of those classical gender conversations.  They were all ready to attack…

Here are some of the quotes I managed to capture.

Oh… they are all between 19 and 22 and I have not used their real names!

Fadi: “Love that brings money!”

Sana “You can’t have both.. life is about either money or love”

Riham: “what kind of logic is it that dictates for you to live penniless (tafran), only to love… it is not worth it”

Maher “ if she is not rich, then she must  be pretty… otherwise it is a waste of time and resources.

Bana: “ Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.  Beauty is relative… the physical beauty is not everything. she might not be rich nor very pretty, but nice, decent, smart and respectful.  Or simply makes you laugh…. It depends on why you  choose to marry”

Rami “ you who took the monkey for his money, the money goes and the monkey stays the same!”

Basem: “ every guy knows why he is with his girl. It could be for fun or for marriage. I think that everyone should decide why they are with a certain person.  I had a girlfriend once. I loved her, but she was rich. I broke up with her, when she picked me up one day… I thought to myself, why am I on the right side of the car?  I knew that it was because I was sitting in her car. I asked myself what would happen if I go to ask for her hand for marriage, what would her father tell me?” I knew that the right thing to do was to set her free.

Mais: “I would love a man and support him even when he is penniless.”

Nour “ The question is very black and white. If I love someone, he must be the type that will get out of his poverty by hard work. So no worries… Love is important and so is the money… I don’t see why it should be and either or question”

Bana: “ I always think that if he does not have a house, where would I raise my kids? I don’t want my kids to grow up in a situation where I can’t provide them with their basic needs… so yes it is both…

Tamer “ ”Money is very important. God says in the Qura’an that money is the embellishment of life. However, we all know that money will come one day when we start working… so I think we should choose for love, because money will come eventually.”

 So what do you guys think?