«Reputation honour more important than life»

The so-called honour crimes are one of the most vexing conundrums facing local communities around the Middle East. Although activists are working tirelessly to end killings of women in the name of family honour, the killing continues, amid silence and sometimes approval from politicians. In a country like Jordan, killers serve no more than six months for taking the life of another person. The rate of killings remain high, but campaigns are slowly baring fruit with the wall of silence surrounding the socially taboo issue is breaking, although very slowly.

Mohammad Ben Hussein works for the Jordan Times covering the parliament and democracy issues. He is also the Amman-based correspondent of a number of international media organisations including the Italian News Agency (ANSA), the United Nation's news Agency for humanitarian issues (IRIN) and Emirates Today English daily (Dubai). Over the past ten years, he worked for Cable News Network (CNN) in Dubai, the German News Agency (DPA), Emirates Media and other organizations.