The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

SOHR exclusive interviews | When women’s honor is limited to their social position in absence of law

Still, the video clip showing the savage murder of an under-18-year-old female by her son in al-Hasakah is provoking local and international reactions and rights organizations that have demanded to apply laws that protect women of violence and curb that serious assaults that threaten the lives of women on alleged shame and honor of the family.

SOHR has published a statement that reads, “local sources have stressed that militants who took part in the crime have deliberately displayed the videotape to announce clearing the shame according to their tribal beliefs.”

SOHR has condemned such heinous crimes that have expanded in the recent years and have become a real threat for the stability f the Syrian society especially in the areas that have been being governed by tribal norms.”

Still, the Syrian society, especially in the conservative environments, is based on the definitions of shame and vice where honor is limited to the position of women inside a family not according to the norms of success, innovation and integrity that should be prevailing.

The definition of honor has been associated with gender which means the authoritarian fatherhood system as males have the right to portray and determine the style of women living inside the family, which is an understanding that should be combated especially amid dangerous statistics that stressed transformation of that disease to deep phenomena that require immediate consideration.
Syrian writer Angel al-Shaer quoted, in an interview with SOHR, Marx saying that “the country is the moral life of the people,” noting that any public life order is governed by morals starting from the political system until reaching the social system. So when the country loses its morals, the people lose their freedom.

That saying completely applies to Syria that doesn’t care about the law or its application. Syria lives in a state of economic, religious, social, and political collapse.

Al-Shaer added that the country doesn’t care about the honor crimes as much as it cares about other things like oppressing the people and increasing the prices, marginalizing the people with hungry and poverty along abusing women under the title of “honor” are other results of social and religious component that was formed after 2011 revolution.

She attributed reasons for the phenomenon rise to its association to the obsolete traditions and habits that govern several areas, noting that each province has its own identity that differs at levels of the eating habits to the prevailing heritage. Meanwhile, some provinces meet on the principle of “female is the honor of families”, she said adding that the personal status law isn’t fair for women.

According to al-Shaer, nothing could fight the honor crimes except for drafting a new constitution that preserves the physical and moral rights of women and issuing a family law the protects women from violence.

She added, “revolution has freed women in its early days. It freed me and took me to the vast space. It taught me the equal participation with men in public life, and the meaning of teamwork, social bond, national bond and it freed us of fears and of slaves.”

The revolution has helped us to enter the political life after the political desertification across the county in nearly half a century. It freed us of the unilateral ideologies to accepting the other opinion and recognizing it. It taught me the meaning of humanitarian work and campaigns, the meaning of protests and how we can say NO. The compulsory YES has gone with the wind. The revolution has taught us how defend ourselves as females and to defend any woman that is targeted under honor pretext.

On the other hand, Syrian poet, Linda Abdel Baqqy told SOHR, “in our masculine conservative society, the problem of honor is associated to females in particular as if men have no honor. We are ashamed of love and we brag of hatred.”

She added that if the female is strong, sincere, respected and has good values and principles, people would name it as the sister of men because “women are deficient in intellect and religion,” as they alleged which means real death of females and bed murder of women. It is an expansion of thoughts of people before Islam whose faces got sad when a female baby is born, then when it grows up it turns into a servant for her brother, then to her husband and his family, to even preventing her from her rights of inheritance.

“How could women inherit while its rights even the rights of expression are looted, while males wander and brag of his illegal relations as a fake evidence of his manhood,” she lamented.

The Syrian poet has wondered, “when our society will be transferred to a civilized society that doesn’t differ between males and females in anything except for the ability to give and promote loyalty and sincerity.”

She added, “In our societies, we have been made and build-up while focusing on the concept of honor which provoked sick minds to murder, kill and loot the rights of relatives with savage hypocrite manhood in a society that has allowed robbery, murder, lie, looting of properties along with depriving women of its rights of good living.

She urged a revolution to protest narrow-minded people until they vanish and to apply respectable civilized behaviors and norms that build good societies and civilizations.

Syrian rights activists believe that applying the laws in that regard is still far-fetched due to the prevailing tribal and male masculine mentalities. They also stressed that the legal framework is very important to achieve justice, and called to prioritize the absence of laws authorities rather than tribal archaic heritages in a way that helps in combating the honor phenomenon.