Human Rights Abuses contine in the Middle East, with no outcry from our women’s groups, or women’s studies programs in the Universities. They brush this off as being “cultural” and want to stay out of it. We must not let this continue in the ME, Africa, USA, anywhere!
comments by Allyson Rowen Taylor
AFP, AMMAN
Monday, Sep 08, 2008, Page 6
When 18-year-old Maha decided that she wanted to quit her family’s prostitution ring, her brother killed her and claimed it was to “cleanse” the family’s honor.
Maha is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of women in Jordan and elsewhere who rights groups say are killed every year by their male relatives in so-called honor crimes for “sullying” the reputation of their families.
The UN has reported such crimes in Brazil, Britain, Ecuador, India, Israel, Italy, Sweden and Uganda as well as in Muslim nations such as Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey.
Accurate figures on such killings are hard to come by because they often go unreported.
In Jordan, between 15 and 20 women are murdered annually in the name of “honor” and at least eight such killings have been reported so far this year, Jordanian authorities said. Last year 17 such murders were recorded.
But the label “honor killings” can be misleading.
Judges, lawyers, activists and experts agree that in most cases men exploit lenient laws and social misconceptions about women to murder them for inheritance, settling family feuds or to hide other crimes.
more www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2008/09/08/2003422641
