The Palestinian wife

Independent:

Sanaa Umar fidgets with her handbag as she describes the daunting task of making a new start when her own father blames her for failing to keep the violent and abusive man who married her at 15 and divorced her at 16.

"My husband started beating me without any reason in the second week of the marriage," says Sanaa, now 17, from Beach refugee camp. Sanaa is not her real name - she is too frightened to be identified. "He beat me with a stick all over my body. It was like he was controlled by a genie. Even his own mother tried to stop him but she couldn't."

The man, a relatively well-off 22-year old, had seen her at a wedding and asked her - very poor - parents for her hand in marriage. Her father, who had made her finish school at 12 and had also often beaten her, was happy. " I agreed because my father agreed," Sanaa explains.

But all along her new husband was conducting a relationship with another 15-year-old girl whose father had forbidden the marriage. At one point, her husband beat Sanaa so badly that she was unable to get out of bed for a week, before he eventually dumped her back at her parents' home.

Thanks to the small but valiant Gaza Women's Empowerment Programme, Sanaa, now living with her parents, has been given a second chance and is training for an independent life as a hairdresser and beautician. At first her father opposed her taking the course because he didn't want her status publicly on display, bringing shame, as he saw it, on the family. "Divorced women have a bad reputation," Sanaa explains.

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Sanaa's experience - the pressure into an early marriage, the abuse by father and husband, and the stigma attaching to the victim rather than the assailant - is all too common in Gaza, where more than one in five women say they suffer physical domestic violence but there is not a single women's shelter. A Question of Security, published today by Human Rights Watch (HRW), excoriates the Palestinian police and justice system for the near-total failure to protect women in both Gaza and the West Bank from abuse ranging from "honour killings" to rape, incest, beatings and sexual abuse.

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This is just another example of the failure of the Muslim culture and the emotional immaturity of many Muslim men. These are the same people who throw tantrums when something is said with which they disagree. This inability to communicate in a calm logical fashion seems epidemic in places like Palestine. Yet many Muslims claim they honor women. Some honor.