Tunisia.. Criticism of legislation that limits violence against women

On Friday, the Ministry of Women and the Family inaugurated the “Eliminate Violence Against Women” campaign with the slogan of the role of social upbringing institutions in providing individuals and groups with skills and mechanisms to resist violence against women and girls amid protests by feminist organizations and their boycott of the international campaign because of what they considered a continuous rise in indicators of violence against women within the country. Tunisian society despite the developed laws.

Sarah Ben Said, head of the Aswat Tounes organization and a member of the feminist dynamic, said in statements to Sky News Arabia that nine women’s associations are boycotting official activities to combat violence this year, in protest against the recording of four murders of women in less than a month, despite their approaching the security and the judiciary seeking protection before they were subjected to a crime. Violence However, the state did not succeed in protecting them.

Bin Saeed added that their protests are in the feminist dynamism in order to demand the implementation of Law 58 to combat violence against women in all its details, far from merely marketing slogans to protect women.

The feminist dynamic formed by associations active in the field of women’s rights had called in a statement on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, for a joint evaluation of the national strategy for combating violence against women and the development of a special plan of action, in order to prevent women’s murders and reduce marital violence and mitigate of its effects on its survivors.

And she called for allocating an adequate and appropriate budget to provide protection for women and to combat gender-based violence in all its forms, in order to embody the effective implementation of Law No. 58 of 2017 related to the elimination of violence against women.

For her part, the President of the Women and Citizenship Association, Karima Al-Berini, called for the necessity of working to change mentalities within society in all matters relating to forms of violence against women, including physical, psychological and economic violence, because justifying violence in private life leads to the continuation of crimes against women. Despite the good intentions of the interventionists from the family and society in order to protect marriage and children, a distinction must be made between marital disputes and marital violence.

A woman cannot be subjected to violence inside her home under the cover of marital disputes, and the family, society and law enforcers must pay attention to this predicament, because the killings that Tunisia witnessed in 2022 of women at the hands of their partners were preceded by violent crimes that the law and society condoned.

In her interview with the website, the feminist activist confirmed that the state is required to activate awareness programs on non-violence in schools, the media, and other social upbringing institutions.

Sociologist Latifa Tajouri commented that the killing of women as a result of partner violence is one of the most dangerous social phenomena in Tunisia because all the legal mechanisms currently in place guarantee the rights of women in the face of all forms of violence and control the mechanisms of intervention for all parties, but society reveals a gap between legislation and The reality is because the state was unable to activate all law enforcement mechanisms and train security personnel in protocols to guide, protect and shelter women victims of violence.

And the specialist in sociology considered that the phenomenon has exacerbated and developed in its forms because the law focused on the punitive approach and did not activate the preventive dimension, calling for not dealing with the phenomenon with a deterrent approach and targeting the victims only, but rather by formulating awareness programs for perpetrators of violence to prevent them from committing violent crimes and avoiding its effects on the victim. Economically, socially and psychologically, and its cost to the family and society in the spread of crime.

Al-Tagouri added that violence is a behavior acquired by a person through social upbringing, and we must start from education in the family, schools, youth homes and professional institutions to review our positions on the phenomenon.

It is worth noting that Tunisia has witnessed in recent years an increase in crimes of physical, psychological and cyber violence against women, despite the passage of four years since the entry into force of the law on combating violence against women in all its forms, due to the slow implementation of the law and the lack of focus on the preventive approach to violence, according to what This came in the latest reports of the National Observatory to Combat Violence against Women.