OPENDEMOCRACY (21/5/2020)
Madeleine is seventeen and dreams of being a chef. But her ambitions have been curtailed. She is behind bars in a juvenile detention centre in Jordan, waiting to be released into the care of a male family member.
“This is the story of a girl in prison: me,” wrote Shahed, another teenage girl who was also detained in the same al-Khanza detention centre, in the country’s capital Amman. “My wish is to live in a place without strict rules, to live free”, she said, “To have stability, to have a job, to be away from trouble and away from violence.” At the top of her letter she wrote: “hope behind the steel”.
Both Madeleine and Shahed were detained under a controversial ‘male guardianship’ system in Jordan that has locked up women and girls for many months at a time without charge or trial, for activities like leaving the family home without permission or for having sex outside marriage.
Many remain locked up amid the current pandemic, still waiting for a male guardian (usually their father or another male relative) to ‘bail’ them out.
Well before the arrival of Jordan’s strict COVID-19 lockdown, I tried to speak to some of the teenage girls impacted by this system. I was not allowed into the al-Khanza centre to interview detainees myself, but some of the girls’ words and photos reached me through Linda Al Khoury, a photographer who did visit them.
For more than six months last year, Al Khoury went to the juvenile centre every week as part of a project to teach arts and crafts to the girls detained there.
The photos they took and the letters they wrote offer a rare insight into their lives and dreams in confinement. Isolated from the outside world, the art and photography workshops gave the girls a chance to speak out about their experiences.