Gender and Violence in the Middle East

Moha Ennaji, Fatima Sadiqi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415594103
• eBook ISBN: 9781136824326
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the relationship between Islamism, secularism and violence against women in the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on case studies from across the region, the authors examine the historical, cultural, religious, social, legal and political factors affecting this key issue.

Chapters by established scholars from within and outside the region highlight:

• the interconnections of violence and various sources of power in the Middle East: the state, society, and the family
• conceptions of violence as family and social practice and dominant discourse
• the role of violence as pattern for social structuring in the nation state.

By centring the chapters around these key areas, the volume provides an innovative theoretical and systematic research model for gender and violence in the Middle East and North Africa. Dealing with issues that are not easily accessible in the West, this book underlines the importance of understanding realities and problems relevant to Muslim and Arab societies and discusses possible ways of promoting reforms in the MENA region. As such it will be of great interest to students and scholars of gender studies, sociology, political science and criminal justice.

1

INTRODUCTION

Contextualizing gender and violence in the
Middle East

Moha Ennaji and Fatima Sadiqi

This volume addresses the issue of gender and violence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with the aim of unpacking its overarching historical, cultural, religious, social, and political underpinnings. While gender-based violence is a universal phenomenon, it takes interesting nuances and wears multiple faces in this region where tradition, social norm, religion, war, and politics intermingle in a powerful and tantalizing space-based patriarchy. The theme of “gender and violence” is relatively new in the field of research; hence, scholarly literature on gender and violence in the MENA is both scarce and dispersed. This volume aims to fill a gap in this regard by assembling a number of chapters that deal with specific aspects of gender-based violence in this region.

What is gender-based violence?

Gender-based violence is one of the most widespread violations of human rights. The United Nations defines violence against women as any act of gender-based violence resulting in physical, sexual, or psychological harm to women. This may include verbal threats, coercion, economic abuse, or arbitrary deprivation of freedom in both the private and public spheres. Thus, violence against women has many forms; it can be physical, sexual, or emotional, and may be caused by a husband, a partner, a family member, or another person. Violence against women also includes sexual harassment and abuse by authority persons such as employers, the police, teachers, etc. Forced labour and trafficking are also forms of violence against women, and so are traditional practices like child marriages and “honour killings”.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which constitutes an international bill of rights for women, was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly. This Convention defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets up an agenda to prevent, eradicate, and punish violence against women and girls. Countries that have ratified or acceded to the Convention are legally bound to put its provisions into practice. They are also committed to submit national reports, at least every 4 years, on measures they have taken to comply with their treaty obligations. Most MENA countries ratified CEDAW with reservations on articles that are said to contradict Shari'a law.

Violence against women and girls in the MENA region, as in the rest of the world, has dramatic consequences for families and communities, as it not only causes harm to women, but also blocks productivity, reduces human capital, and undermines economic growth.

Work on gender-based violence in the MENA region

The MENA area has become a hotbed for violence against women. The Yemen Post released a study that found 2,694 incidents ofphysical and sexual abuse against women in 2007. Sudan Daily reports that 278 incidents of violence against female citizens occurred in just 3 months. Likewise, in Egypt and Algeria, women are victimized. In Morocco, one-third of all women suffer from domestic abuse.

Violence is a weapon for subordinating women. As long as the present system of domination maintained and juridical and social inequality continues, both men and States will feel legitimated to pursue violence against women.

The victims of today's wars are 70–80 per cent civilians, most of them women. They are being tortured and humiliated in prisons and refugee camps. They are systematically raped—a practice deliberately used as a weapon in many conflicts.

There is a link between militarism and patriarchal oppression. Both in times of peace and times of war patriarchal societies oppress women to unbearable violence: crime, rape, precariousness, unemployment, economic insecurity, trafficking. This violence should be fought by building a feminist platform based on solidarity and abolishing all forms of oppression and discrimination.

While violence against women has become a central issue in women's movements across the MENA region in the last decade, with an emphasis on domestic violence, “honour killings”, early marriages, and zina cases, the dominant research paradigm on gender-based violence in the MENA region is that of the victimized Muslim women and their male oppressors on the basis of culture and religion. Most of this research is confined to NGO-based activist work, and is not available in scholarly circles. The impact of gendered political, social, and economic power on gender-based violence is seldom addressed, and so is the role of the State in banning or punishing violence against women. Consequently, acts of violence against women, in cases where the female victims are accused of having defied sexual norms, or attempted to avoid enforced marriages, are still taboo.

We believe that scholarly work alone can broaden perspectives of defining the issues of violence against women, and systematically address family, community, and State's involvement in the right policies on violence against women.

Themes addressed

Thirteen chapters have been selected to address various themes that touch on gender-based violence. These themes may be delineated into seven categories: a theoretical background for gender-based violence, war and violence, politics and violence, religion and violence, media and violence, health and violence, and the state of affairs in so far as legislative measures against violence in the region are concerned. The themes naturally overlap, and issues such as tradition and domestic violence explicitly or implicitly run through most of the chapters. The countries covered are Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Algeria, and Morocco. Each one of these themes may be rooted in the overall socio-political environment of the MENA region.

Setting the ground

Our basic theoretical premise is that gender and violence in the MENA region are intrinsically linked. We adopt a gender-sensitive definition of violence because we believe it alone goes beyond the limits of physical violence, and assumes inequality between the sexes to be structural, that is, based on the fact that constructions and perceptions of femininity and masculinity have symbolic and cultural roots that regulate gender role assignment and perception (Sadiqi, 2003; Ennaji, 2005). Within this framework, violence and power are bound to be related, and the role of the State is bound to be key in this relationship. Consequently, the following themes will be discussed: the various interconnections of gender, power, and state-society; gender and conflict (wars, civil wars, religious and social conflicts); media representations; domestic violence; political violence; health issues; and legislative measures.

It is important to note that these themes interact in significant ways. The powerful institutions of the family, the State, society, and the community are framed within specific national visions, which, in turn, are deeply impacted by colonial and other types of conflicts.

War and gender-based violence

Gender-based violence, especially sexual violence, is often exacerbated during conflict and post-conflict situations (Krieger, 2003). The stereotypes surrounding masculinity are highlighted, and just as war is accepted as part of history, so too has rape become regarded as a natural, foreseeable, and unavoidable consequence of war. In times of war, women and girls are targeted for sexual abuse on the basis of their gender, irrespective of their age, ethnicity, or political affiliation. By virtue of their gender, women become the target of one of the most serious violations of human rights, and protective mechanisms are extremely ineffective or, in some situations, non-existent. Women are deliberately victims in war, and in times of peace their own homes are turned into living hell.

Politics and gender-based violence

The MENA region has admittedly witnessed positive developments with regard to the public participation and representation of women (Enhaili, 2006; Ennaji, 2010). For example, the percentage of seats held by Moroccan women in the national parliament increased from 4 per cent in 2000 to 6 per cent in 2004. These advances have been boosted by the quota system and appointments which yielded fruit in Tunisia, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, Iraq, and Djibouti. However, countries like Iran and Yemen witnessed a decline in female representation in their parliaments. Likewise, many women have been appointed to cabinets and other high-profile positions, and women in Kuwait recently received the right to vote and run for public office.

However, the MENA region still lags behind other regions so far as women's public participation and representation is concerned. In some countries, there has even been regression of women's public representation. MENA women still face a higher uphill battle in national or parliamentary elections due to a combination of political circumstances, social preconceptions, or the (in)ability of candidates to appeal to broader audiences. However, more progress is being made in local and municipal elections.

MENA women are doing better in NGO formation and leadership. Here they focus on globalization, information technology, the environment, education, and healthcare (Ennaji, 2010).

Women and economic participation

In spite of the overall economic growth, most MENA countries continue to struggle with high unemployment rates and women are disproportionably at risk. The biggest difference between male and female unemployment can be seen in Egypt, where 9 per cent of men versus 21 per cent of women were unemployed in 2007, and in Syria, where male unemployment was 8 per cent in 2006 whereas female unemployment was 22 per cent (Arab Human Development Report, 2009).

There are considerable intraregional disparities in the MENA women's participation in the economy of their countries, as well as in the status of this participation. For example, most working women in this region participate in the agricultural sector (Naciri, 2003). Because of the increasing rate of unemployment, it is generally believed—wrongly—that by encouraging women's work, men, culturally defined as the breadwinners of the family, will suffer from more unemployment. By contrast, there is a growing belief in the region that women's work boosts the household income and helps to combat poverty.

Access to education

Today, more and more girls have access to education in the MENA region. The difference between the older and new generations of women in terms of education is huge. For example, 88 per cent of young women were literate in 2005, in comparison to only 62 per cent of literate adult women. The same trend is attested in Yemen where 53 per cent of girls and young women were literate in 2005, to be contrasted with only 31 per cent of female adults (World Bank Report, 2007). Similarly, more and more girls and young women are completing their education, and the literacy gap between young men and women is steadily diminishing.

However, gender disparities in education persist: women still opt for jobs that “culturally fit” their social expectations, and gender stereotypes persist in school textbooks.

Gender-based violence

Women are the most frequent victims of violence in the region, including widespread domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape, and human trafficking. However, women rarely approach the authorities for assistance, because the latter are often biased against women.

Many factors prevent women and girls from reporting violence. The most important of these are traditional cultural beliefs concerning the inferiority of women; the social negative attitude to lodging a complaint about the husband, the father, or the brother; the absence of legislation on violence against women; the lack of sensitivity on the part of law enforcement officials; poverty and ignorance; inadequate facilities to shelter and assist women; and the difficulty for women to prove physical violence. This situation consolidates the idea that domestic violence is to a certain extent tolerable.

The MENA Governments have to establish legislation that combats violence against women and policies that preserve women's dignity and safety. Nevertheless, because of the dominant patriarchal mindset, the road to ending violence against women is long and arduous. Despite the growing number of centres for battered women, unfortunately the number of victimized women is on the rise. The key to lasting crime prevention is education and programmes set up to offer women a way out.

Health and gender-based violence

Women in the MENA region have made steady progress in the domain of health, as the spectacular decline of the fertility rate shows. For example, in Morocco the fertility rate has dropped to 2.4 per cent. Family planning policies and women's education are the main causes of this welcome decrease (Ennaji, 2008).

The healthcare system is benefiting more and more women in the region, and infant and child mortality, as well as maternal maternity, are on the decrease. Of course great disparities exist between rural and urban areas: rural women marry at a younger age and have more children. They are also more exposed to the weight of tradition and social norms.

Legislation and violence

Progress in women's rights has been attested in the MENA region. Despite the encouraging changes, challenges remain. As mentioned above, most of the countries have ratified the CEDAW but with provisions and reservation that undermine potential progress. Certain articles of the CEDAW are rejected because they are considered to be incompatible with national legislation and the Shari'a. These include article 9 (discrimination in granting nationality to children of foreign fathers) and article 16 (discrimination relating to marriage and family relations).

Challenges remain in national laws concerning matters of marriage, divorce, polygamy, child custody, inheritance, and nationality. For example, women do not enjoy the right to pass on their nationality to their children in instances where the children's father is a foreign national except in Morocca and Tunisia. Similarly, the penal code in many MENA countries does not protect women from crimes committed against them such as “honour killings” and sexual assault.

The chapters

Patricia Zuckerhut's chapter summarizes the prevailing concepts of violence in social anthropology. It focuses on the problem of grasping local views while at the same time needing a universal definition of violence to be able to compare violent acts at different times and localities. Two related topics the chapter also deals with are the questions of legitimacy and of social function of violence and violent acts. Starting from these considerations, Zuckerhut presents some important aspects that feminist research on sexualized and gendered violence has to bear in mind to be able to accuse such behaviour and at the same time prevent being itself violent in an epistemic way.

In her chapter, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian presents the torment of the Palestinian woman, who suffers from war, occupation, and domestic violence. She uses the approach of “The Colonizer and the Colonized” by Albert Memmi (1991) to try to express the voices and to portray the ordeals of Palestinian women living under military occupation. The chapter reveals how the current situation is closely related to the past, and how the daily violence deprives women from safety and prevents them from receiving an education. The chapter shows that this disruption of everyday life cannot be divorced from the surrounding context of colonization and occupation.

The chapter by Islah Jad discusses the role of government and non-government organizations in alleviating the impact of violence on women and youth. The author surveys the gaps that exist between urban, rural, and refugee camps. The study reveals that the regions facing prolonged exposure to violence exhibit a tendency to internalize violence and reproduce it locally. This situation has a devastating impact on local communities within each locality and impacts them in very negative ways. Jad shows that the effects of military violence are aggravated when there is a lack of an integrated development approach and a lack of institutional support for the community to draw on.

Lamia Rustum Shehadeh describes the war and its consequences on gender relations in Lebanon. She argues that the Lebanese war has obliged many to move from their homes into the public space, which has triggered their ultimate liberation from their traditional and patriarchal chains. The chapter analyses the effects of the Lebanese war on the lives of women and the roles they played during this outrageous period of time. It describes a double life of conflict and normalcy, which shaped the experiences of Lebanese women for 16 years and transformed, to a great degree, the place of women in society.

Achim Rohde assesses the Iraqi public discourse on women and gender, as conveyed through the daily press during the years of the Iran—Iraq war in the 1980s. Regarding its stated political agenda, the Ba'th regime placed gender issues at the centre stage throughout the years of its rule, albeit with changing connotations. While the regime initially promoted modest gender reforms, in the mid-1980s and late 1980s a notable discursive swing occurred towards more traditionalist gender policies. These changes coincided with the height of the Iran—Iraq war. The chapter, which uses press items as its main source, focuses on the semi-official General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW), a civilian mass organization attached to the Ba'th party, and its changing relation to the regime's leadership. It thereb...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
• UCLA Center for Middle East Development (CMED)
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• 1 Introduction: Contextualizing Gender and Violence in the Middle East
• PART I Conceptualization and Theoretical Background
• PART II Armed Conflict and Gender-based Violence
• PART III Politics, War, and Violence against Women in Iraq and Afghanistan
• PART IV Religious and Social Violence against Women
• PART V Gender-based Discrimination and Legal Reform
• PART VI Language, Sexual Harassment, and Media
• Bibliography
• Index