It started like any other session we have all seen before. A simple room. Plastic chairs lined up in rows. Women walking in quietly, some alone, some in pairs, exchanging polite smiles, sitting down, waiting. We thought we knew how this would go. We thought it would be another routine gathering; information shared, a few nods, and then everyone returns to their lives unchanged.
But something in the room felt different.
There was a silence; but not an empty one. It was heavy. The kind of silence that carries things inside it. Questions that had never been asked. Words that had never been spoken. Lives that had been lived quietly, without ever being named out loud.
On the occasion of the International Women’s Day, Pro Peace Jordan organized four awareness sessions for eighty women; forty from Russeifa and forty from Jerash refugee camp; in collaboration with its partner organizations Athar for Youth Development and Hopes for Training, Education and Development, with the support of the European Union Delegation to Jordan. What was meant to be structured awareness sessions slowly became something far more humanly touching: a space where women were not just participants, but voices, stories, and lived realities finally finding room to exist.
At first, no one spoke.
You could feel the hesitation, the caution, the fear of saying something too big, too personal, too real. Then, one woman raised her hand. Her voice trembled slightly. She asked a question that seemed simple on the surface, but it cracked something open in the room.
After her, another spoke. Then another.
And just like that, the room changed.
Women began to share their realities:
A daughter who was pulled out of school at 13; not because she failed, but because it was decided for her.
Another girl whose future was drawn for her; confined within her parents’ home, waiting for marriage to define her life, before she ever had the chance to pick up the pen and imagine her own story.
Someone mentioned a phrase used in their community: “Home confinement for girls.”
And suddenly, it no longer sounded like a phrase. It sounded like a life.
Another woman spoke about a phrase that carries a painful meaning in her community: “No to green.” Green, the color of girls’ school uniforms in public schools, has come to symbolize something far greater than clothing. The phrase shouts:
No to girls’ education.
No to girls having opportunities.
No to a future that is quietly pushed out of reach before it can even begin.
These were not abstract discussions. These were not case studies. These were women sitting in front of us, naming realities that are often hidden behind closed doors and polite silence.
The sessions were designed to focus on legal awareness; particularly on the personal status laws, and the cybercrime laws. And these were discussed. But what unfolded went much deeper than information.
Because for many women, this was the first time they realized something that had never been said to them clearly:
What they were living was not just “normal.” It could be questioned. It could be named, and it could be challenged.
And in that realization, something shifted.
What started quietly did not remain so for long. Women began to notice red flags they had once been taught to ignore. They began to ask questions that had been buried under years of silence. And slowly, courage started to circulate in the room; from one voice to another, from one story to the next.
Facilitating these sessions was Dr. Abeer Dababneh, a lawyer, and a former professor at the University of Jordan’s Center for Women’s Studies who is currently working with the Independent Election Commission. Her presence grounded the conversations in both knowledge and humility.
It was in this fragile space, between silence and voice, between hesitation and truth, that she guided the conversations forward, not as someone above the room, but as someone within it.
“I am used to speaking in academic spaces,” she reflected, “but here, I felt something different. I felt reality, unfiltered.”
What she witnessed stayed with her.
Girls leaving school too early.
Early marriages that end childhood far before it had even begun to see its completion.
Women carrying responsibilities and restrictions they never chose.
And then she said something that settled heavily in the room:
“Violence does not end where it happens. It continues in ways we don’t always see.”
She spoke about cycles; how harm, when left unspoken and unaddressed, does not disappear. It moves. Quietly. Across generations. Through silence. Through normalization. And breaking it requires more than awareness; it requires courage, systems, and collective responsibility.
She also reminded everyone that those who work on women’s rights must not remain distant from the realities they speak about.
“We need to leave our bubbles,” she said. “We need to come here. To listen. To see.”
Because what she saw could not be ignored.
And as conversations deepened, another uncomfortable truth surfaced: sometimes, the structures that limit women are not only imposed from outside, but sustained from within communities themselves. Practices like denying inheritance are often justified through fear of fragmentation, of losing resources outside the family. These realities are complex, layered, and deeply rooted in social norms that have been passed down for generations.
Yet even in this complexity, one truth became clear: silence sustains everything.
And silence was finally breaking.
By the end of the sessions, something had shifted that could not be measured in attendance sheets or agendas. Women were no longer just listening. They were questioning. Reflecting. Speaking. Connecting their own experiences to something larger than themselves.
The room that once held hesitation now held recognition.
Not all change is loud. Some of it begins quietly, in the moment a woman realizes she has been living a question she was never allowed to ask. And when she finally asks it, nothing remains the same.
These four sessions will not solve everything. But they did something important: they opened a door that cannot be easily closed again. Because once a woman names what she is experiencing, she can no longer fully unsee it. And that is where transformation begins.
And maybe this is the truth we are left with: “When silence is broken, awareness becomes responsibility, and responsibility becomes change.”