Malak Al-Fraijat qualified in law and then spent her time explaining digital safety, intellectual property and artificial intelligence to around 250 young people in Tafileh.
A law degree in Jordan is usually a route to a courtroom, an office, or, very often for a young woman in a southern governorate, to a qualification framed on a wall while the labour market fails to absorb it.
Malak Al-Fraijat, twenty-three, took hers and pointed it at the internet.
“Rights are not abstract once they are the rights you are currently losing online.”
As a youth-committee activist at the Queen Alia Centre in Tafileh, she ran sessions under the Knowledge Caravan on a set of subjects that sound technical and are in fact urgently practical: digital safety, intellectual property, cyber-safety, and artificial intelligence. Around 250 young people attended.
It is worth appreciating how well matched her training is to that syllabus. Digital safety and intellectual property are not IT topics. They are legal ones. What a young person needs, when their photograph is misused or their work is taken or they are being extorted on a messaging app, is not primarily technical advice. It is someone who can explain what the law says and what recourse exists.
In a country where online blackmail is a documented and growing harm, and one that falls disproportionately on young women, a twenty-three-year-old lawyer standing in front of a room of her peers in Tafileh, explaining what their rights are, is doing preventive work that no complaints mechanism can match.
The artificial-intelligence element is more forward-looking still. AI arrived in Jordanian schools and universities faster than any guidance about it, and young people in the governorates are using tools whose rules nobody has explained to them. Somebody had to get there first with the questions about authorship, ownership and honesty. In Tafileh, it was Malak.
There is also the simple matter of who is standing at the front. A room of young people in a southern governorate, being taught law and technology by a woman of twenty-three from their own community, receives two lessons simultaneously, and the second one is not on the syllabus.
She did not wait for the law to give her a career. She used it, immediately, on the problems in front of her.
