The Effect on Women Driving

By:Jad Baassiri

Edited by:Danya Nahas

 

 

Imagine you’re a cop in The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia driving and you see a women wearing hijab driving, what would you do? In 2010 two females were caught driving to the airport wearing men’s clothes according to the Shura Council. Some female teachers in AIS-R said “Its really difficult to live in Saudi if we ( women ) aren’t allowed to drive.

 

Shura Council stated that if the females in Saudi Arabia were able to drive in the future, women should be of the road at 8 pm and they must be in a specific age. The punishment for a women getting caught driving in Saudi is 150 lashes. One of my friends Shaher Tabbaa an 8th grader said " I think women in Saudi should be free like US women because they should be able to drive on the road at any time. I also think they should drive because  if the family couldn't afford a driver they should drive". One of my family members who lives in Lebanon is always stuck in her house. Her husband is always at work busy, and she doesn’t have a driver. She’s always bothered because sometimes their house is missing some stuff, but she can’t go anywhere until her husband comes back.

 

The Shura Council also stated that women can drive in small cities, but there should be a male relative next to them. If in the future women in Saudi were able to drive the Council said, " There should be a female traffic department," because if by any chance a woman was driving and it broke down suddenly, a female police would come and help the person with car.

 

The Council states that over 80% of people in Saudi voted for women to be allowed to drive, because males and females around Saudi Arabia think its not fair to let only males to drive. Research says if women were as educated as men, than the mens car accident population would increase, because they say men are really aggressive at driving.

 

Most people say in US that the average age for women driving is about 30-65 years old. Medical health PubMed encourages that women over 50 should stop driving because it's not healthy for them and it might be dangerous. However here in Saudi the government don't allow women to drive, they said they might let them drive in the future, but with having rules.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About all the 6th and 7th graders in AIS-R voted agree, for whether they think women should drive or no. There was only 7 disagrees in the whole 6th grade.  However most of the boys in 7th and 8th grade said disagree, I asked some 7th and 8th grade boys why they think women shouldn't drive, they all said "because we think that women aren't as efficient as the men in driving". All the boys I asked said women aren’t as efficient as men at driving because it is rare for women to learn how to drive.

 

Mary J. Bauer states that women aren’t as efficient in driving as men because women like to text and communicate while driving in the car. One of my friends Tarif Al-Hakim said “ Maybe that’s why people around the world say that women aren’t as efficient as men, it’s because they like to communicate more than the guys in the car”. In U.S the percentage of women driving while texting is about 38% according to Campaign. So that makes a car accident 23 times more faster and quicker, so which increases car accidents.

 

The women who took the risk to drive to the airport got a punishment for doing something that is common human rights. Yet if women in the US get caught driving they won’t receive any punishments, so why are the women in Saudi threatened to the natural human rights? The Saudi government is trying to change by lifting the ban of women driving in Saudi, but I don’t think they will be changing in the future. Women want and deserve to drive because sometimes their husbands are busy and they can’t afford drivers.