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IV. Failings in Institutional Responses to Violence against Women and Girls

I think society and institutions are becoming more and more aware of violence against women and some ministries are now trying to cooperate…But there are no procedures on how to implement the basic protections that exist.

— Su`ad Abu Dayya, director of the social welfare department at the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling, East Jerusalem, November 9, 2005

The Palestinian Authority has failed to create an effective institutional framework to prevent violence against women and girls, punish these abuses when they occur, encourage victims to report acts of violence and protect them from further violence. The Palestinian police force lacks the expertise, and apparently the will, to deal with cases of violence against women in a manner that is effective, sensitive to the needs of victims, and respectful of their privacy. Meanwhile, the absence of medical guidelines for doctors also seriously affects the quality of treatment afforded to female victims of violence.

The few Palestinian women and girls who make the decision to report abuse to the authorities find themselves confronting a series of institutional obstacles that prioritize the reputation of their families in the community over their own health and lives. Human Rights Watch learned that one of the aims of the Palestinian criminal justice system with regard to cases of family violence is to avoid “public scandal” at all cost. While it is true that unwanted publicity can deepen the shame families feel, possibly fueling further family violence, an appropriate response would allow the victim to press charges while respecting the confidential nature of their cases. Instead, police officers often “mediate” and “resolve” these cases in the police station, sometimes proposing marriage as a solution to a rape. The belief supporting this practice is that there is no “harm” or “shame” in rape if the rapist restores the “honor” of his victim and her family by marrying her. The number of rape and incest cases that the police “resolve” through marriage every year in the OPT is unknown. One women’s rights activists told Human Rights Watch that the police never register these cases or report them to the courts.¹⁸⁵

Victims of sexual violence in particular routinely pay the price for the abuse they have suffered. In the ultimate reversal of justice, women who report abuse to their families or the authorities may be forced or coerced to marry their rapist or a stranger to “erase” the abuse before it is revealed to the wider community. As one observer noted, these forced marriages “absolve society of the responsibility of dealing with such crimes.”¹⁸⁶ At every level of Palestinian government, even when the state is acting as guardian of a minor, as in the case of the Bethlehem Home for Girls (described in detail below), marriage is pushed as the answer to rape.¹⁸⁷

Social service providers working in NGOs are also at risk of violence. According to several NGO social workers who did not wish to be identified, family members of their clients sometimes subject them to threats, intimidation, and violence. These professionals assume great personal risks when they help women and girls escape from abusive families and confront perpetrators of abuse. Several women’s rights activists spoke to Human Rights Watch about the failure of the PA to protect not only their clients, but also themselves, as service providers. One social worker said, “There is no law to protect women victims of violence or protect us as social workers. They [perpetrators of violence] intimidate and threaten us and yet there is no law to protect us.”¹⁸⁸Another social worker described how the family of one of her clients, a victim of family violence, intimidated her for intervening: “They [the family of the victim] called me and came to my house. They said they would light my house on fire. They said they would kidnap me and my children… I was so afraid. They called themselves the murder brigade.” When she reported these threats to the police, they monitored her cell phone but provided little more assistance. “The police were cold. They played with my feelings. They said, ‘you’re a social worker; you have no right to be afraid.’ I didn’t feel like they were protecting me.”¹⁸⁹

The Role of the Police

Some police officers are really working with us. But the problem is that we don’t work with the police as a whole, just individuals. We don’t have specialized people to deal with victims of [gender-based] violence or special units. Everyone might know [of a case] since there is no [specific] area where privacy is ensured.

− Su`ad Abu Dayya, director of the social welfare department of WCLAC, East Jerusalem, November 9, 2005

The Palestinian police have proven to be unable or unwilling to deal effectively with cases of violence against women. While the Ministry of Interior has instituted basic procedures to ensure that women who report violence to the police do so in the presence of a female police officer, specialized expertise to adequately handle family violence complaints is entirely absent. As a result, Palestinian police officers often resort to mediation among the parties (sometimes in coordination with the informal justice system, governors, and powerful clan and tribal leaders) to “resolve” the problem. In several instances, Palestinian police officers have returned women to their families even when there is a substantial threat of further harm.¹⁹⁰ It is unclear how much decision-making power, if any, women hold in this process.

Police bias against victims of gender-based violence and their lack of expertise on how to handle these cases drives many social workers to accompany their clients to the police station to see that the police file the report correctly. Su`ad Abu Dayya of WCLAC told Human Rights Watch: “They are not trained [to deal with violence against women]. They don’t have any procedures, so they tend to go into tribalism [coordinate with tribal leaders] since this in the only resource that they have. So if we’re not there, that’s what they will do.”¹⁹¹

Several of the service providers Human Rights Watch interviewed asserted that the police have a reputation for failing to respect the privacy of women and girls. One social worker told Human Rights Watch, “We know that when we go to the police, a scandal will happen. There is a crisis of trust with the police. There is no confidentiality at the [police] station. Fifteen people will hear her case.”¹⁹² According to another social worker, a 35-year-old woman who became pregnant outside of marriage was forced to flee to Jordan after a police officer spoke publicly about her case. “When she went to the Rafidi hospital [in Nablus] to try to get an abortion, the doctors contacted the police right away because they were afraid. One of the police officers there to protect her told everybody in town [about her case].”¹⁹³ Another woman, Mariam Isma`il (pseudonym), experienced this lack of confidentiality firsthand. She told Human Rights Watch:

I never wanted to go to the police because I didn’t want my family to know about the sexual abuse. I hoped that the police would keep the situation confidential after the interrogation, but the next day the story was out and everyone knew that my husband had forced me to have sex with others.¹⁹⁴

The day after Mariam reported the abuse to the police, the press documented her case in a manner which revealed her identity.

The head of police for the West Bank and Gaza admitted that confidentiality is a problem. “In the present conditions, it’s hard to keep control of the situation, to keep cases private.”¹⁹⁵ However, the authorities have reprimanded only a handful of police officers for disclosing confidential information. The head of the Jericho Police Training College knows of only six or seven police officers who were disciplined and only one who was fired in the past nine years for publicly disclosing confidential information about a case.¹⁹⁶

Social workers and lawyers also noted that powerful clan leaders, members of the political elite or highly ranked members of the various Palestinian security services are “above the law” and are able to close police files implicating them in culpable conduct. One lawyer told Human Rights Watch that “when a person from an important family commits a crime, the police think a hundred times of the consequences for themselves before pursuing the case.”¹⁹⁷In a case where an influential man repeatedly raped his daughter, a university student, a social worker told us she felt she could do nothing but encourage the woman’s grandmother to sleep in the same room as the daughter to prevent her politically-connected father from further abusing her.¹⁹⁸

Police officers, including senior members of the Civil Police, downplayed the importance of violence against women. The head of the Police Training College of Jericho told Human Rights Watch:

More important than violence against women is law and justice. If a patient has cancer but also has a wart, you are not going to look at the wart, there are more important things… But if we tackle these issues and solve them, we will move on to the issues that are easier and lighter to tackle.¹⁹⁹

He also questioned the need for the police to disseminate information to assist victims of violence seeking to report abuse. “We can’t advertise. It’s hard for us to advertise. We will look like we’re encouraging women to go to the police. It is the role of the Ministry of Social Affairs and the women’s organizations to say that violence against women is a crime.”²⁰⁰

Police officers were equally unapologetic about their efforts to mediate and encourage marriage in rape cases. According to `Ala’a Hussni, the head of police for the West Bank and Gaza:

Lots of cases are solved in a way that maintains the best interest of the individual and to protect the girls. I can get her rights but I don’t want to kill her to protect her. Going to court kills her socially. [Instead] we can take disciplinary actions against the man; we can limit the problem through the family

The head of Ramallah police, Taysir Mansur (Abu al-`Aiz), echoed these views:

If we find out that a man has had relations with a woman, most cases end in marriage. We try to minimize the situation…Rape happened. The important thing is that it happened. This is the girl in the society. Who will marry her? To protect her reputation and her family’s reputation, they [both families] tell us that they’ve agreed to reconciliation… It’s better to secure her future than for her to become a victim. Say for example a girl was raped and we imprison the man for 10 years. In a city like Cairo where no one knows the girl, the situation ends this way. But here, a girl can’t escape. What if she’s not a virgin? She can’t escape this situation on her wedding night.²⁰²  

Interviews with Palestinian police officers also revealed an inclination to view sexual violence within the family as consensual. The head of the Ramallah police told Human Rights Watch:

It’s not rape. It’s confinement (kabt), suffocation, and ignorance. The occupation affected this. I’m not going to blame everything on the occupation but it played a role. A father goes to work in Israel, an open society. He’s exposed to pornographic films, while his wife from the village is not used to it. Maybe he goes to work, and leaves the film in the house. Then brothers and sisters and cousins see the film and get ideas. Of course it’s consensual once they see the films. Is there any brother who would want to sleep with his sister?²⁰³

The head of the Nablus prison, Tawfiq Mansur (Abu Muhammad), echoed these views. He spoke to Human Rights Watch about an inmate, a 30 year old woman, who was transferred to the prison a day before our meeting. She had become pregnant after her father had engaged her in what Mansur assumed was a consensual sexual relationship.  He said, “If it was rape, why didn’t she report it? If someone rapes his family, they [the community] kill him and that’s it.” He also spoke of another case that he assumed was not rape. “I had a case of a mother who killed her husband for allegedly molesting their daughter. But I saw them, the girl looked stronger than him.”²⁰⁴

Several women told Human Rights Watch about incidents of degrading treatment at police stations. When Human Rights Watch spoke to Reem Hamad (pseudonym), she had been in Nablus at the only shelter for women in the OPT for five months.²⁰⁵ She told Human Rights Watch that her father used to beat her and attempted to rape her on several occasions. After one of these attempts, she went to a police station in Nablus to seek help. She told Human Rights Watch that police officers mocked her because of her dark complexion. “When I went to the police, one of them said ‘do you think you’re so beautiful that your father would do that to you?’”²⁰⁶

The Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling has been working since early 2005 to provide specialized training to the police, including two sessions of an 80-hour training on how to deal with domestic violence cases. They have also helped to train personnel in the police to work with the new shelter that has been created in an unnamed West Bank city and claim that the cooperation is working well and is essential to the success of the shelter. However, WCLAC is frustrated that a 2005 NGO recommendation supported by a core group of police officers trained by WCLAC, and adopted by the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, to form a specialized unit in every police station to handle domestic violence complaints, has still not been implemented.²⁰⁷

The Role of Medical Professionals

The health care system is typically the first and sometimes the only government-run institution with which women victims of violence come into contact. Regrettably, it is ill-equipped to deal with such cases with the level of professionalism and sensitivity required. Survey findings indicate widespread misinformation and prejudicial attitudes among Palestinian doctors towards violence against women. These biased attitudes combined with the absence of medical guidelines and the lack of sufficient training on how to treat victims of violence have left victims with little support from the health care sector.

The Absence of Medical Guidelines and Breaches of Confidentiality

There are no ministerial procedures or protocols to deal with family violence cases. Most doctors lack specialized training on how to treat victims of violence and the importance of keeping cases confidential. The PA lacks a medical ethics law or code governing the conduct of physicians.

Ohayla Shomar, director of Sawa, a Jerusalem-based organization combating sexual violence, has experienced the manner in which the absence of such medical protocols affects the quality of care afforded to women victims of domestic violence. “In the emergency room, people [doctors and nurses] don’t know how to deal with them, so they give them pills to calm their nerves and then send them home. Some women get traumatized again at the hospital,” she said.²⁰⁸

The Bisan Center for Research and Development, a capacity-building organization based in Ramallah, has held four workshops for health care professionals on how to handle cases of violence against women. They trained 20 doctors through this program in Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem and 44 doctors from Gaza. Rahma Mansur, a program advisor at Bisan, noted that these medical professionals displayed a sense of disbelief about the levels of violence against women.²⁰⁹ They also did not know how to identify victims of domestic violence and how to deal with their cases. She told Human Rights Watch, “When we started talking about it, it was clear that they didn’t have the skills or knowledge about how to deal with victims. We needed to train them that even though no physical signs of violence exist, there may still be violence.”²¹⁰

These workshops prompted the Bisan Center to publish a report entitled, “The Approach of Palestinian Physicians towards Wife Abuse” in 2003.²¹¹ To carry out the study, researchers conducted interviews and distributed questionnaires to 396 Palestinian doctors between September 2001 and April 2002.²¹² The results were startling. Close to half of physicians surveyed, 44 percent, agreed with the statement that “a very small percentage of Palestinian women are abused by their husbands.”²¹³ Approximately 63 percent of the physicians interviewed considered only severe and persistent abuse to be domestic violence, while 47 percent “qualified their definitions in a way that that might be taken as implicitly or explicitly blaming the woman for her husband’s violent behavior….”²¹⁴ The doctors showed a considerable amount of empathy for the perpetrators of violence and very little for the victims: 38 percent felt that “if the abused wife understood her husband’s life conditions, he certainly would not have abused her”; 29 percent agreed that “wives are abused because of the abnormal way they treat their husbands”; 16 percent agreed that “most abused wives deserve to be treated violently by their husbands”; and 10 percent thought that “most abused wives feel relieved after their husbands batter them.”²¹⁵

Many doctors do not record cases of violence against women and girls brought to their attention. The head of the Ramallah public hospital told Human Rights Watch:

We receive two to three criminal cases a day involving car accidents or injuries on the job. We have less than 10 cases of domestic violence per year. I don’t have specialized statistics. We don’t classify these cases. We will just note that the woman was hit by others in the report....If we talk about car accidents, we have this information.²¹⁶

The hospital lacks any specialized expertise on treating and assisting victims of violence. “We have one social worker doing clerical work since she’s not qualified to monitor cases,” said the head of the hospital.

Palestinian women’s rights organizations have documented cases of doctors in Palestinian hospitals disclosing confidential patient information without the consent of the patients, thus deterring women from reporting abuse and potentially costing women their lives if their cases become widely known. Halima Abu-Sulb, an attorney with WCLAC, described one such case in 2002 involving a 16-year-old girl from Ramallah who went to the hospital with her mother to treat a leg injury.²¹⁷ After examining the girl, the doctor came out to the waiting room filled with patients and said to her mother, “how can I give her an X-ray? Your daughter is 8-months pregnant.”²¹⁸ The pregnancy was the result of repeated rape by her two brothers, aged 16 and 21.²¹⁹ Her mother later killed her, claiming that the social pressure to kill her daughter was overwhelming following the incident in the waiting room.²²⁰ While her brothers are serving sentences for the rapes, a court imprisoned the mother for only one month for the murder and the father for only one week for his involvement in the death.²²¹

The head of the Ramallah hospital told Human Rights Watch that if doctors suspect that a patient has been the victim of any type of crime, they are required to report the case with or without the woman’s consent to a police outpost next to the hospital. “Some doctors have some awareness. They speak to the women and give them referrals. These are mostly private doctors. In the public hospitals, they all contact the police directly. They don’t want to take on this responsibility.”²²² Private doctors in the OPT generally have far better access to financial and technical resources as well as more institutional distance from the authorities, which may explain these differences in approach.

The International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO), a global organization representing obstetricians and gynecologists in over 100 countries, has provided clear guidelines to health professionals treating victims of violence. In a resolution on violence against women adopted in 1997,FIGO noted that physicians are ethically obligated to: “educate themselves, other health professionals and community workers about the extent, types, and negative consequences of violence against women; increase their ability to identify women who are experiencing violence and to provide supportive counseling and appropriate treatment and referral; work with others to better the understanding of the problem by documenting the determinants of violence against women and its harmful consequences; assist in the legal prosecution of cases of sexual abuse and rape by careful and sensitive documentation of the evidence; and support those who are working to end violence against women in their families and in communities.”²²³ These ethical obligations, among others, should be incorporated into health protocols devised by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Forensic Doctors and Forced Virginity Testing

An intact hymen meant that the abuse could be silenced, hidden, and denied.

− Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian²²⁴

In the West Bank and Gaza, the police and public prosecutors usually require that unmarried women and girl victims of sexual abuse undergo virginity examinations by predominantly male forensic doctors.²²⁵ These tests attempt to determine whether or not the victims are virgins by examining the status of the hymen, and if it is not “intact,” to establish whether it was broken as a result of sexual intercourse and when it was broken. According to one public prosecutor in Hebron, “not all sexual assault cases are sent for virginity testing. It depends on the allegations. If they come and say there was no intercourse, then there is no need. If she alleges rape or is a minor, we do the test since she might not really know if she was penetrated or not.”²²⁶According to another prosecutor in Ramallah, forensic doctors (at the request of public prosecutors) usually order these tests in all sexual violence cases, while women and girls who allege that they have been raped will undergo an additional DNA test.²²⁷ Prosecutors sometimes administer these tests without the victim’s consent. A prosecutor told Human Rights Watch that “if it is important for a case and we really need it, we’ll do it even without consent. For example, in a case of alleged rape, we would need to do virginity test to check…We only impose absolutely necessary tests.”²²⁸

Prosecutors ask forensic doctors to administer virginity test on the corpses of women and girls who are believed to be victims of “honor” crimes in order to verify whether or not they were virgins prior to their death. Courts can use this information to determine whether the perpetrator(s) should benefit from mitigating circumstances. If a forensic doctor deems the woman or girl to be a non-virgin, even if the loss of her virginity can be attributed to rape or incest, a judge presumably may reduce the killer’s sentence. A public prosecutor told Human Rights Watch:

In an autopsy they check the entire body, head to toe, including virginity and pregnancy tests. The full report, including the findings of these tests, will be reported. Again, this is part of a general autopsy and all the findings are given to us by the coroner. But yes, the main item of interest in the investigation of an honor killing would be the virginity test. For us, the prosecution, it does not make a difference if she is a virgin or not because we deal with it as a murder case. But the problem is in the courts because of the clause of mitigating circumstances. The court considers everything including motives, circumstances, etc.

Virginity testing is intrinsically linked to “honor” crimes against Palestinian women and girls. Family members sometimes force victims of sexual abuse and women and girls suspected of having extra-marital sex to undergo virginity examinations.²²⁹ The results of these exams are a matter of life and death, since family members have perpetrated “honor” crimes against Palestinian women and girls after the disclosure of this information.²³⁰ In addition, Palestinian advocates who did not wish to be identified report that public doctors often cover up the cause of injury or death when confronted with cases of family violence and record erroneous causes on death certificates in cases of “honor” killings.

Families also pressure doctors to record a woman as a non-virgin to help support a murder defense based on “honor” killing. The former head of the Abu Dis Forensic Institute, Dr. Jalal `Abd al-Jabar, told Human Rights Watch that he regularly conducted virginity exams on victims of alleged “honor” crimes or victims of sexual abuse.²³¹ He also administered these exams on the bodies of women and girls who were murdered by their families. In cases where the tests suggested that a woman or girl was a virgin, undermining a family’s allegations of sexual promiscuity, he told Human Rights Watch that family members had often intimidated him to change the results and report that she was not a virgin, so that the perpetrators of the murder might receive a reduced sentence:

When we examine a woman that died of an honor killing and it turns out that she’s a virgin, people intimidate us and push us to say that she was not a virgin. They know they will get 17 years if she’s a virgin instead of a reduced sentence due to mitigating circumstances.²³²

According to Dr. `Abd al-Jabar, public prosecutors send only a minority of cases to the Institute since family members will sometimes secretly bury women and girls whom they murdered.²³³ He also told Human Rights Watch that when he was at the Institute, they administered all virginity tests with the consent of the woman and always conducted them in the presence of either the Institute’s secretary or a nurse (both female):

I’m always on the side of the woman. I would like to help the community. If she’s not a virgin, it doesn’t mean that she’s a bad woman. She could be born without a hymen…. You can never know with complete certainty whether the hymen was broken from intercourse. I’m not here to give permission for murder.²³⁴

For some victims of violence, having to undergo a painful, humiliating, and invasive virginity test was as abusive as the violence itself. Some women and girls are traumatized by this experience. The police forced Reem Hamad (pseudonym) to undergo a virginity test when she reported her father’s attempted rapes to the police.

That’s when I knew that the police are not in the service of the people. They’re all dirty. They examined me and didn’t find anything, that’s why they said that I lied. It was the first time that someone took a look inside me. I was humiliated. Having someone examine me was the biggest crime my father committed.²³⁵

Human Rights Watch maintains that such examinations are unjustified, that the emphasis on female virginity is itself inherently discriminatory, and that, in any case, virginity is irrelevant as evidence of sexual assault. A voluntary gynecological examination might be legitimate, for example, in order to collect evidence relating to a rape charge. However, there is no legitimate rationale for virginity examinations. Instead, such exams reflect a misplaced preoccupation with the victim’s ostensible virginity and popular misconceptions about the medical verifiability of virginity. Experts have confirmed that the state of a woman’s hymen is not a reliable indicator of recent sexual intercourse or the nature, consensual or otherwise, of any such intercourse.²³⁶ The degree of elasticity, resilience, and thickness of the hymen, its location in the vaginal canal, and consequently its susceptibility to tearing and bruising, vary from person to person.²³⁷

The Informal Justice System

As Palestinians have lost faith in reform of the judicial system, they have turned increasingly to “traditional” means of settling disputes through the informal justice system.²³⁸ The informal justice system runs parallel to the formal system and seeks reconciliation between parties rather than a judicial or penal remedy. The system is run by “informal judges” who usually inherit their positions from fathers or grandfathers and who must be well-respected, powerful members of the community. The informal judges call a series of public hearings to address a variety of disputes (such as cases of assault or financial or land disputes) between members of the community with the goal of formulating a reconciliation agreement or contract that must be signed by the involved parties. If either of the parties violates the terms of the contract, they are punished, usually through a monetary fine payable to the other party.

Du`a Mansur, the research coordinator of a forthcoming Birzeit University study on the informal justice system, told Human Rights Watch that:

[I]nformal judges do not work according to any body of law, set of procedures or precedents from similar cases. Thus the format of the public hearings and the formula applied in each case depend very much on the views and experience of the informal judge involved. There are no typical solutions to any type of case.²³⁹

Another study on informal justice describes a type of unwritten tribal (customary) law which is used as a frame of reference in the informal justice system.²⁴⁰ Decisions of the informal justice system are not legally binding, they are “enforced” through community pressure and respect of the parties for the stature and decisions of the community’s informal judges.

The informal justice system is not part of the official, law-based justice system in the OPT. However, sometimes elected and appointed officials and members of the regular criminal justice system are also the informal judges in their home districts.²⁴¹ The Birzeit study asserts that Palestinians turn to the informal justice system more than to the regular justice system, and that Yasser Arafat supported the informal justice system by sending high ranking officials to adjudicate in particularly difficult cases and by contributing financially to the monetary fine to be paid in some cases.²⁴²

Since informal judges rarely intervene in domestic conflicts, the system often does not address cases of violence against women inside the family. In cases of potential “honor” crimes where the woman’s life is at stake, however, there is frequent recourse to informal justice mechanisms. According to one observer, “the most respected, powerful, and renowned tribal heads are entrusted to deal with the most difficult of social problems (e.g. femicides and killings).”²⁴³ Tribal notables often view social disputes involving alleged violations of the “sexual purity of females (ard)” as the most serious offenses.²⁴⁴ Informal justices may attempt to broker a deal in which the family promises not to harm the girl or woman or to search for a member of the clan or extended family who can shelter the girl or woman in their home. However, a study carried out by the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling noted that informal judges, who are always male, often sympathize with the male offenders, even in cases of honor killings. One judge interviewed for the study said:

Whenever a woman is suspected of anything, it is a sign that she has done something grievous. I question the woman to determine the validity of what she says to me. I have the ability to determine if a woman is lying or telling the truth. My experience has shown me that I can tell the truth by looking in her eye. In the absolute majority of cases involving women, the woman’s deviant behavior is the reason for her death. A man does not punish or kill a woman without a reason.²⁴⁵

Police officers told Human Rights Watch that they regularly coordinate with the tribal and clan leaders in a town or village in which an incident took place.²⁴⁶ A Palestinian women’s rights activist also noted that police officers have told several of her clients to refer their cases to their clan leaders for mediation.²⁴⁷ As this system is non-judicial and non-regulated, there is no way to ensure that a woman’s legal rights will be upheld.

A social worker told Human Rights Watch that in her experience, clan leaders often approach the police when cases involving a member of their clan reach the police station: “If they don’t get the answer they want, they contact the higher ups in the police. There is a lot of power and space opened to them, much more than even the Palestinian Authority…The [Palestinian] Authority allowed these influential clans to become more powerful than they are…And no efforts have been made to restrict their role.”²⁴⁸

The Role of Governors in the Informal Justice System

I’m against this system; all cases should go to the courts. But this is the result of the difficult judicial situation. People want quick solutions, so they go to governors. This is the result of the failure of the criminal court system. If you have a case, even a minor one, that takes five years, what do you do?

− Suha Allaya, legal affairs assistant, Ministry of Justice, Ramallah, November 26, 2005

Governors of OPT governorates, who are appointed by the executive branch and serve as the representative of the president for indefinite terms, also play a role in the informal justice system. Their status, and thus ability to intervene in disputes, varies according to their closeness to the president.²⁴⁹ During the intifada, when the regular courts were functioning poorly, Palestinians often turned to the governor’s office for a quick resolution to disputes.Researchers at the Institute of Law at Birzeit University confirmed to Human Rights Watch that governors do not have formal judicial powers enshrined in law bur rather are actors in the informal justice system.²⁵⁰ Another observer of the role of governors in resolving disputes claims that governors have tried to justify their interference in the judicial system based on provisions in various outdated laws and regulations.²⁵¹ These laws include Jordanian legislation such as the Administrative Divisions Regulation No. l of 1966 and the 1954 Law to Prohibit Crimes that gives local Governors some emergency power to prevent crimes.²⁵²

Governors have been involved in “resolving” cases of violence against women and girls. Victims of violence sometimes report to the governor’s office in their town in order to avoid the stigma of going to the police station.²⁵³ Rape and incest victims, unmarried pregnant women and others threatened by their families will come to the governor’s office seeking protection.²⁵⁴ Governors have on occasion provided shelter for these women.²⁵⁵

According to Lina `Abd al-Hadi, the legal advisor to the governor of Nablus, the governorate has received hundreds of reports of incest. She told Human Rights Watch:

In the past two years, there’s been an increase in incest cases because of shared living quarters and the inability of men to marry… We get six to seven rape cases a year and lots of incest cases…When I bring the fathers in, they don’t deny it. They say ‘I have a right to her body over others’ or ‘I want her to go to her husband experienced.’²⁵⁶

While Lina `Abd al-Hadi claims that their office has the authority to detain perpetrators for up to one year, Human Rights Watch could not find any reference in legislation to confirm this assertion. She said “we use the provision that allows us to imprison people for one year especially in moral cases. In the [regular] courts, it could take years…I would prefer that these cases go to court since it’s a longer sentence.”²⁵⁷

While some governors are helpful to women who report abuse to them, others have shown bias against women in their handling of cases of violence against women. Manal Awad, the head of the women’s empowerment program at the Gaza Community Mental Heath Program, spoke to Human Rights Watch about her experiences interacting with governors. “The police just call the mukhtar [governor], and he solves the problem. They blame her for the problem. We have some problems talking to them. Some of them think that women are always wrong.”²⁵⁸ As another analyst of the governor’s system noted, “The Governor’s office often interpreted the law with what might be called a nationalist’ attitude.…The emphasis on ‘unity’ often favored the stronger party in the dispute.”²⁵⁹

In some cases of threatened honor crimes, governors broker deals with family members who promise not to harm the women and girls if they return home. These deals have resulted in the deaths of several women and girls. While governor’s offices and district courts penalized some family members who committed these murders (although most received reduced sentences), the police and attorney general’s office have never investigated governors and others who may hold some responsibility for these deaths. In fact, there are no mechanisms to monitor the conduct of these informal government officials or to hold them accountable for their actions.

The Ministry of Justice and members of the judiciary were critical of the use of mechanisms other than the regular courts to resolve legal disputes. Then-minister of justice Farid al-Jalad told Human Rights Watch in November 2005: “I don’t think this is the right way to solve problems. There has to be respect for the judiciary. The police should transfer every case except simple ones based on minor personal claims to the courts.”²⁶⁰ According to one judge who wished to remain anonymous, “before [the intifada], all cases were going to the courts. But now they’re solved by ‘mediation’ at the police station. Lots of cases don’t reach the courts. The governor also ‘solves’ a lot of these cases. There’s a police force, there are courts, they [the governors] shouldn’t be doing this.” Despite these views, the minister of justice told Human Rights Watch that no action has been taken to curb the quasi-judicial activities of governors.²⁶¹

Inaccessible Shelters for Victims of Violence

Why does murder happen? Because there’s no place to protect women.

− Court of Appeals judge Hani al-Natur, Ramallah, December 1, 2005

The PA has failed to establish sufficient protective mechanisms to shelter victims of violence. Despite the systemic nature of violence against women in the OPT, there was only one shelter solely devoted to women victims of violence operating in the West Bank during the period of research for this report in November and December 2005.²⁶² It is located in the West Bank town of Nablus and can house only 25 women for periods of six months. It cannot accommodate their children. A home for girls in Bethlehem (Bayt al-Fatayat) shelters some victims of physical and sexual violence, although its mandate is much broader and includes housing girls whose parents can no longer care for them physically or financially. The lack of shelters has forced women’s organizations and the police to come up with creative but often dangerous solutions for victims of violence, including sheltering them in police stations, governors’ offices, private homes, and institutions such as schools for the blind and orphanages.

The police have held some women and girls they deem to be at risk of violence, particularly prior to the second intifada, in “protective” custody in women’s sections of Palestinian prisons. They largely phased this practice out due to Israeli military attacks on jails during the intifada and new insistence on the part of the Ministry of Interior that the police hold all detainees only under court order. However, when Human Rights Watch visited the Nablus prison in November 2005, two of the 14 women incarcerated appeared to be there primarily to protect them against family violence. According to the head of the women’s section of the prison, the police suspected one of these prisoners of having an extra-marital affair and harming her husband. While she wishes to leave and claims that her family would never harm her, the head of the prison services, the chief of police, and the judge who heard her case all believe that she must remain behind bars until they are assured her family will not try to kill her. The state decided to move her, and the man with whom she is accused of having the extra-marital affair, who is also incarcerated, from the West Bank to Gaza after her family allegedly opened fire on the Ramallah governor’s office where they were being held. Another young woman in the Nablus jail is purportedly there because she left home without her family’s permission and is at risk of being harmed by the family.²⁶³

Movement restrictions within and between the West Bank and Gaza make it virtually impossible for some victims of violence to reach the shelters in Nablus or Bethlehem, leaving them without a refuge from violence.²⁶⁴ In emergency situations, NGOs and the police have illegally sent women and girls at risk of violence to Israel or Jordan for safety, although increased security at the borders and the separation wall has made this option increasingly difficult. Ghadir al-Shaikh, an attorney in the West Bank town of Tulkaram told Human Rights Watch, “There is no shelter to protect women in Tulkaram, so even if you empower her, there’s nowhere to protect her. And she sees that all the other cases like hers end up dead.”²⁶⁵

Israeli military incursions and movement restrictions have also isolated some Palestinian women in ever-more localized spaces, especially in rural areas where women have tremendous difficulty accessing extended family networks or social and protective services. This trend is reflected in the small number of girls housed in Bethlehem’s Home for Girls (Bayt al-Fatayat) and the women’s shelter in Nablus. The director of the Bethlehem home told Human Rights Watch that in 1999 they housed 49 girls at one time, but that, at least in part due to girls’ difficulties in accessing the facility, there were only 12 cases when Human Rights Watch visited in November 2005.²⁶⁶

Victims of family violence in Gaza are in a particularly bad position since it is virtually impossible for residents of Gaza to reach the West Bank, and no shelters exist in Gaza. The absence of a refuge for victims of violence in Gaza forces women’s organizations to resort to solutions to which they are ideologically opposed. Manal Awad, head of the nongovernmental Women’s Empowerment Program, told Human Rights Watch, “Sometimes the police call to say that a woman has been raped and there’s no place to protect her. We have to look for a governor to help, even though we’re against this system which is generally against women. They will usually ask her to marry him [the rapist] if they know who he is.”²⁶⁷

With respect to the two shelters that exist in the West Bank, women’s rights organizations have voiced concerns that the lengthy entry procedures set by the Ministry of Social Affairs prevent victims from receiving urgent assistance. Some social workers and lawyers have also complained that once they refer a client to the Ministry of Social Affairs, the ministry does not allow them to follow-up on the case or meet their client again because the cases would now come under the ministry’s jurisdiction.

Representatives of the MOSA admitted that there are weaknesses in its responses to violence against women. One senior ministry employee told Human Rights Watch, “We deal with these cases and protect many women from being killed, but we don’t deal with theses cases in a professional way since there are no specialist social workers and there’s no time to deal with these cases.”²⁶⁸

A combination of financial and bureaucratic obstacles has stalled efforts to establish new shelters in the West Bank and Gaza in coordination with the Ministry of Social Affairs. WCLAC has secured funding and built a shelter for women and their children in Bethlehem, which is not yet operating. In early 2006, after the field research for this report had been completed, WCLAC also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with MOSA and started operating an emergency shelter in a West Bank city, the identity of which was not revealed so as to provide added protection for women or girls who seek to use it. This emergency shelter is a place where women seeking refuge from violence can go quickly without onerous bureaucratic procedures. After two years of difficult negotiations with MOSA on the terms of admittance and the regulations for running the shelter, WCLAC reported to Human Rights Watch in June 2006 that the MOU they negotiated ultimately contained all the provisions they had fought for and that they were very satisfied with the relationship between the shelter, the local police and the local MOSA.²⁶⁹ The Ministry has also built and equipped a shelter for girls under the age of 18 in Jenin and has been planning to open it for the past three years.²⁷⁰ Ministry officials could not give Human Rights Watch a clear reason why the shelter is not operating yet but WCLAC said that it was due to financial and political constraints.²⁷¹

The Nablus Shelter

The shelter in Nablus works in a secret way. We don’t want to deal with it in a secret way. The individual cases should be secret, yes, but not the issue. The issue of violence - we have to raise it. Some people in the ministry [of social affairs] are against us since they want it [violence against women] to be kept underground.

− Diane Mbarak, Ministry of Social Affairs, Azaria, November 25, 2005

The Family Defense Society (FDS), an NGO that receives limited financial support from MOSA, runs the shelter for victims of violence in Nablus. At the time of Human Rights Watch’s visit in November 2005, four women lived in the shelter, which has a capacity of 25. Residents can stay for up to six months, although a committee made up of the FDS and the MOSA has the discretion to renew this term.²⁷² MOSA approves each applicant and transfers cases to the facility; it is also responsible for the basic regulations of the shelter.²⁷³ Before the establishment of the Nablus shelter, victims of violence and women threatened with “honor” crimes would regularly sleep at the police station or within Ministries or be detained in “protective” custody in prisons.²⁷⁴

In order to be eligible to stay in a shelter, a woman must meet a set of strict criteria established by the MOSA. The shelter does not accept women suspected of being drug addicts, mentally ill, prostitutes, and those who are deemed to be a physical danger to others.²⁷⁵ Social workers at leading women’s rights organizations told us that they often hesitate before referring victims to the Nablus shelter because of the sometimes lengthy entry procedures imposed by the Ministry. One social worker told us that she had to house a woman threatened by her family in her office for several days with serious potential risks to the woman and the NGO staff, while the Nablus shelter reviewed her file.²⁷⁶ As a condition to entering the facility, the center tests women for HIV/AIDS and pregnancy, and administers virginity examinations to determine the status of the hymen.²⁷⁷ The shelter admits both virgins and non-virgins. The women and girls we spoke to considered this testing mandatory and thus thought there was no way to opt out. One woman told Human Rights Watch, “They have a law that any girl who comes here has to do the test.”²⁷⁸ The shelter did not provide any counseling in connection with these tests.

The Bethlehem Home for Girls

MOSA established the Bethlehem Home for Girls (Bayt al-Fatayat) in 1985 in order to “protect and rehabilitate” girls between the ages of 12 and 18. The home receives victims of incest, unmarried pregnant girls threatened by their families, and girls whose parents are imprisoned or cannot afford to financially support them. MOSA coordinates the transfer of girls to the Bethlehem home. The girls go to school during the day if the staff deems it safe for them to do so; girls threatened by families who live in the Bethlehem area or nearby do not go to school but attend in-house training in sewing and hairdressing. The director of the home stated explicitly that she does not allow the girls to leave the facility even when they reach the age of majority (18) unless their families agree to take custody of them or they marry.²⁷⁹ She said that under no circumstances would she allow adult women to live on their own.²⁸⁰ When we verified this information with then Minister of Social Affairs Hassan Abu Libda, he appeared extremely surprised and said this was not MOSA policy.²⁸¹

When the facility receives an unmarried girl who is pregnant, as a result of a rape, staff generally try to mediate between the rapist and the girl’s family. The director of the facility told Human Rights Watch that marriage is the optimum solution to rape cases.²⁸² When asked what would happen if the woman or girl did not want to marry her rapist but rather wanted to press charges, she deemed this unthinkable. In cases where the victim becomes pregnant due to the rape, MOSA considers it imperative that she marry because otherwise the child will be an “illegal child” who does not have rights to a birth certificate, and the ministry will immediately take the baby from the mother and put him or her up for adoption.²⁸³ The head of the home told Human Rights Watch that:

She says who it is. If three men raped her, we do DNA tests. We force her to marry. He’s not allowed to divorce her for five years…He’s imprisoned if he doesn’t marry her. If the police couldn’t force him to marry her, they sometimes predate the wedding certificate before the birth of the child. The majority do not want to marry him [the rapist]. But screw her [toz feeha], the baby is what’s important.²⁸⁴

In the six years Jihad Abu al-`Ain has headed the Bethlehem home, she has pressured five girls to marry their rapists.²⁸⁵ A social worker, who has worked there for 15 years, said she has seen countless such cases. ²⁸⁶

The staff of the Bethlehem home call girls they deem to be non-virgins, following a forced virginity test, “special cases.” According to Jihad Abu al-`Ain:

We don’t talk about them. Not all the social workers know of these cases. Special cases don’t return to their family. We play the role of their family. She continues her education or we find her a marriage…We don’t throw the girls on the street. We don’t let her rent a house. She needs to be under a legitimatesituation with decent people.²⁸⁷

A social worker at the home told Human Rights Watch, “marriage is the most successful rehabilitation. She will stay here if she doesn’t want to get married.”²⁸⁸