Afaf Jabiri is regional coordinator of Karama ('dignity' in Arabic) - a network of women activists working to end violence against women in the Middle East and North Africa. Groups in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon work together to develop country specific strategies for ending violence against women on their own terms.
Karama's approach to tackling violence against women goes beyond drawing attention to the impact it has on women physically and emotionally. The network takes into account the root causes and social consequences of the violence by highlighting the impact it has on different sectors of society - political, economic, health, education, religious and media.
This podcast is part of openDemocracy's '16 days' series covering the annual 16 days against gender violence. Related podcasts include the UN's John Holmes on confronting sexual violence worldwide, Faustina Fynn Nyame on halting the 'preventable pandemic' in Ghana and Takyiwaa Manuh on domestic violence in Africa.
Download or listen now to all the podcasts here.
Later this month | How do we dismantle the institution of war?
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Last Thursday I attended Femmes en Resistance (Women in a State of Resistance), a round-table discussion with representatives from female resistance movements in Burkina Faso, France, and the Maghreb. This event was held in Montpellier as part of The 19th Quinzaine des Tiers-Mondes, a fortnight of events highlighting the struggles of various minorities and resistance groups across the globe.
Although I am aware that each state has individual needs, the impressive degree of alliance and support which frames the female resistance movement across the Arab world, thanks to organisations like Karama, is something which has struck me for some time. Listening to Afaf’s podcast, I was therefore not surprised to find many common notes between her discourse and that of Rachida Haidoux, the representative from the Franco-Maghreb cultural association, Coup de Soleil, who offered a comparative view of the female resistance movements in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria at Thursday’s roundtable.
The thread of consistency which binds their discourses together is recognition of the need to adopt a multi-dimensional approach and attack the root causes of the problem. Whilst Afaf recognises the key role of policy change, like Rachida, she also highlights the fact that policy changes must both stem from and be replanted back into the cultural and social soil. Afaf takes as her example the revision of the Mudwana, now frequently, and often symbolically, referred to as The Moroccan Family Code. She notes that 4 years after its revision only 1% of women were profiting from the amendment to guardianship law.
The progressive revision of the Mudwana has been celebrated internationally, and Rachida claims that today Morocco is the most ‘dynamic and interesting’ of the countries of the Maghreb. Yet Araf seems sceptical; the female resistance may appear strong on paper, but the aforementioned figure clearly shows that policy changes simply must be translated into grass-root currency before true success can be proclaimed.
At the Montpellian roundtable it was a Christine Delteil, a French representative of the CIDF, The Centre d’Information des Droits des Familles (The Information Centre for Family Rights) who really encapsulated the importance of awakening the social consciousness when she stated that ‘at the base of society, at the base of democracy, and at the base of equality, is someone who knows their rights.’
And this need to include the masses in the movement by making them aware of their existing and potential rights is something which Rachida did not leave unaddressed. In a country where 46% of women are illiterate, Rachida stressed the need to proactively inform women about their new rights, as well as reminding them, and in many cases introducing them, to their basic human rights: ‘this is the only way to combat violence and oppression’. And it is not just a question of targeting women. Naturally, men form an essential part of the equation too.
Rachida, like Afaf, is optimistic for the future. She retains a celebratory attitude and hopes to see a rise of initiatives such as the ‘women caravans’, teams which head out into Moroccan villages to inform people about the new Family Law; this certainly seems like the kind of thing which Afaf is talking about when she stresses the need to link policy change to attitude change.
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