Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/tag/tunisia/)
The school dress code rules in Tunisia are discriminatory, these girls say. “Why can boys feel comfortable in their casual clothes while we girls have to wear this smock?” one says.
A high school theater piece in Tunisia reveals what girls there consider the double victimization of rape. “I think it’s time for the Tunisian society to understand that a shotgun marriage will never be the solution for rape,” one girl says.
One girl didn’t want to change out of her shorts to leave her house in Tunisia when she went to buy chips. “I felt like a cultural prisoner,” she says.
The White House announced a two-part approach to campus sexual assault, offering assistance to the victims and making public the colleges under investigation. Also this week, in Nigeria, the number of girls kidnapped continues to rise.
Three European activists face up to six months of prison for staging a topless protest in Tunis to demonstrate support for a Tunisian ally, Amina Sboui, who is facing legal problems of her own.
Tensions are rising between secular Tunisian women and political Islam. “There is no room for the opposition and women to participate in building the country we want,” says one critic.
In sideline panel events at the 57th Commission on the Status of Women, talk was of working for further transformation in everything from the Egyptian constitution to the safety of women throughout the uprisings.
For the country that glows like a beacon of women’s progress in North Africa, the government’s first shelter for survivors of domestic violence finds it lagging far behind neighboring Morocco.
Two years after the start of the Arab Spring, Hajer Naili interviews three post-revolutionary women about the increasingly radical Islamist forces that are smothering their hopes. “I don’t even know what their aims are,” says one woman.
The new Islamist government isn’t shoring up abortion access, but a women’s rights activist says the loss of access to public abortion began five years ago, when the Ben Ali regime began cutting social costs and privatizing services.