Husseini alarms audience

Author: Tess Russell

After Rana Husseini received her Master's degree from Oklahoma City University (OCU), she found herself in a predicament that will be shared by many Middlebury seniors come next spring - she was finished with her formal schooling but was not sure what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

She did know that she wanted to help advance the cause of women's rights, an interest she had cultivated while working for the newspaper at OCU, and so she returned to her home country of Jordan in 1994 and took up a job as a reporter. Covering the crime beat at The Jordan Times, she was fatefully assigned, during her early days on the job, to investigate a local "honor killing."

Husseini was so moved by the young woman's plight that it inspired her to undertake a career of activism that would ultimately earn her international recognition as a pioneer in the field of human rights.

An honor killing is the murder of a girl or woman at the hands of a male relative - often a minor, who will face more lenient legal repercussions - perpetrated with the intention of "cleansing the family's honor." Adultery, or even idle rumors of it, is enough to condemn a woman, as is her refusal to waive her rights to an inheritance. These atrocities occur mainly among poor, lower middle-class populations where reputation is of the utmost importance.

"In my country, people live for what their neighbors think of them," Husseini told the audience. "This is a fear that we need to get over, and that is something that we are working towards."

Still, despite the fact that her coverage focuses primarily on occurrences in Jordan, Husseini is quick to stress that region, and religion, have no bearing on the incidence of honor crimes. She has written about this tragic fate as suffered by both Christian and Muslim women within her country and believes that the phenomenon - rooted in the male quest for dominance - is universal, citing the Salem witch trials and more recent events in rural areas of Italy and Spain as evidence.

These sociological factors are covered extensively in Husseini's upcoming book "Murder in the Name of Honour." The 2008 release of the book in English and Arabic (it has already been published in Dutch) is highly anticipated, but Husseini has been receiving attention from media outlets around the world ever since she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Reebok Award in 1998.

In the late 1990s, her writings began to attract the support of women's rights NGOs based everywhere from the neighboring Egypt to faraway Sweden, where activists started to put pressure on local governments to reform law enforcement policies.

For her part, Husseini is optimistic about the prospect of legislative changes - particularly after her recent receipt of Al Hussein Decoration for Distinguished Contribution of the Second Order, which was the first public backing she received from the Jordanian royal family. Still, she feels that it will take a more grass roots approach to truly change what is in people's hearts and minds, and that this strategy should begin with reforms to Jordan's system of education.

"If our teachers are closed-minded and inexperienced, and sometimes even have extremist thoughts, then we become victims of our education, and are deprived of our ability to think critically," Husseini said.

She pointed out that many of the young males forced to commit honor killings are essentially brainwashed, but she has witness a positive trend on that front.

"In the past when I would lecture, I would often see young men standing up and asserting that they would kill their own female relatives if they were called upon," Husseini said. "Now they are asking what they can do to avoid that responsibility. I think that is an important shift."