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Law No. 58 of 2017 expands the definition of punishable abuse and violence against women, and it was meant to affirm Tunisia’s pioneering stance on women’s rights in the region, guaranteeing legal and financial support for survivors. But in the absence of political will and considering the lack of resources and the rigid mindsets reflected in state institutions—the police and judiciary chief among them—the law is not being fully implemented, and achieving justice for victims remains, to this day, very difficult.
The real shortcoming that stands in the way of providing women with safety lies in the deeply ingrained patriarchal mindset and sediments that members of the security services and the police hold on to, these individuals who are entrusted with the task of enforcing the law and protecting women when they receive complaints of violence. This is illustrated by the experience of Hanan, a victim of domestic violence in Tunisia who spoke to Medfeminiswiya. Hanan is now waging a battle to free herself from the grip of her violent husband.
Police is patriarchal, so how could it protect women?
Hanan, a woman in her thirties and the mother of two children, recounts her experience with the Security Center where she went to file a complaint with the National Unit to Combat Violence Against Women after enduring months of continuous physical and moral domestic violence at the hands of her husband.
“The head of the violence unit asked me to calm down and forgive my husband for the sake of the children. He said it was just some light slaps, it’s over now… He said my husband hadn’t hurt me or made me bleed.”
“My husband is a violent alcoholic who has made my life hell. He assaults me and breaks things around the house every time I express any sort of dissatisfaction with his behavior, how he evades his responsibilities to provide for the children,” Hanan tells us. “It kept getting worse,” she continues, “until one cold winter night he beat me in front of my children and poured a bucket of cold water on me. Then he locked the doors to all the rooms to stop me from going to sleep in any of them. He left me to sleep in the hallway, as punishment.”
About the members at the Security Center, Hanan says, “The head of the violence unit asked me to calm down and not make matters worse, to forgive my husband for the sake of the children. He said it was just some light slaps, it’s over now… He said my husband hadn’t hurt me or made me bleed like a lot of the women who go there, and that I had to try to fix things and forget about divorce as that would destroy my family.”
If these statements indicate anything, it’s that violence against women is normalized and regarded as a fate that women must live with, which proves how rooted patriarchal masculinity is in the minds of those whose job it is to combat violence. It proves how important it is not to be content with mere legislation, not to be too happy about it, because things go much deeper than laws, programs, and policies. It’s about rotten, deeply rooted mentalities that require radical change, which will not come easily.
Hanan did not take the security officer’s advice. She clung to her right to pursue her husband legally before he could become more violent and take her life, as is the case for many other women. She filed for divorce and set out on a long and arduous journey to obtain her rights and get her husband convicted for harm and violence.
“The judge downplayed the violence I was subjected to and called on me to be calm and rational.”
Hanan describes her first interaction with the judge during a reconciliation hearing. “I was very surprised at how the judge downplayed the violence I was subjected to and called on me to be rational and deal with the harm on a superficial level. He even said that the abuse was just an example of normal marital skirmishes.”
The judge’s position shows that there is no culture of rejecting violence against women in Tunisian society. Some state employees, whose work consists of protecting women, do not have any real belief in human rights. This makes it difficult to implement strong legal texts amid a lax political culture geared toward human rights—and the accompanying civil and judicial behavior.
It is within this context that we are witnessing a rise in cases of domestic violence, which now represents the highest percentage of recorded forms of violence according to the latest data of the Ministry of Women, Family, Children, and Seniors. The “green line,” a free hotline that women can call to register complaints, received about 921 reports of violence during the first three months of 2023 (654 of which recorded the husband as being the perpetrator of violence, i.e. an average of 71%), noting that in the first few months of 2022, the number of reported domestic violence cases was 168—reflecting an increase by threefold.
In addition, a field study on “Pathways to Support Women Victims of Violence,” published in 2022, revealed that more than half of the interviewed survivors consider that the police and national security services made available within the framework of implementing Organic Law No. 58 relative to the elimination of violence against women are “bad and extremely bad.”
This study showed that among the major problems that women face during the process of reporting violence is how remote the specialized teams are and how sporadic their availability. Not to mention that women are subjected to additional harassment by the security agents themselves.
On top of all the above, we cannot forget the quarantine period in Tunisia between March and June 2020, during which an unprecedented rise in cases of violence was recorded: the number of complaints related to physical and verbal violence increased by five times.
In 2020, the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women Listening Center in Tunis received a large number of testimonies from women who had been subjected to domestic violence—much more than the number of cases recorded during the same period the year before.
A wide gap between legislation and application
Feminist organizations in Tunisia agree that there is a major discrepancy between the 2017 law and the institutional and social practices that have not kept pace with the spirit of the law and do not respect its provisions; this indicates a real shortcoming at the executive level that needs to be seriously addressed.
One of the ways this discrepancy between legal text and reality is manifested is when the law provides protective methods and means of prevention and protection from domestic violence and has provisions to punish perpetrators and compensate victims, but without providing the necessary infrastructure, listening centers, or shelters. Indeed the state did not allocate a sufficient budget to achieve all this despite the assistance it offered; listening centers are only offered by women’s associations, and victims of violence flock there on a daily basis.
In addition to the above, official curricula across all levels of education lack any sort of material addressing topics such as gender equality, non-stereotypical gender roles, and the need to settle disputes in personal relationships through peaceful methods and not by enacting gender-based violence against women.
Law No. 58 also includes an important clause that stipulates the separation of the perpetrator from the victim at the first instance of violence, but this clause is never implemented. Various agencies avoid this precautionary separation for purely patriarchal and cultural reasons, as they cannot wrap their minds around forcing a man to leave his home and be separated from his wife, the victim of his violence.
The structure of traditional society may very well be what most upholds deep-rooted patriarchy, as it makes society an unsafe place for women by perpetuating the customary distribution of gender roles in relationships, manifested in the roles assigned to women who have to take care of the rights of men.
Dr. Nayla al-Selini explains…
In an interview with Medfeminiswiya, Nayla al-Selini, a professor of Islamic history, explains the origins of male dominance from a gendered Islamic historical approach: “The structure of Islamic society, though it may have seemed fluid in its internal system, was rigid in its general framework because it was based on the customary organization of relationships between individuals, which made this system take on a hierarchical structure.”
“The relationships between individuals took the form of women having to care for the rights of men, and these jobs are, in the eyes of Islamic jurisprudence, eternal jobs that women are destined to keep up for social movement to be in the right,” al-Selini adds, noting that “the most dangerous and most influential of these concepts is that of guardianship, be it in the guiding of daily practices or as a lens through which Quranic text is understood.”
“In the eyes of patriarchal Islamic society, women are “scapegoats” that can be slaughtered at a god’s table for the purpose of purifying society”
Dr. al-Selini also states that women in Arab societies have always been targeted in their existence as social entities, and this is the result of the ideological discourse that has spread across classes, accusing and holding Arab women responsible for the backwardness of Islamic societies—in the eyes of patriarchal Islamic society, women are “scapegoats” that can be slaughtered at a god’s table for the purpose of purifying society.
We can then conclude that “the concept of guardianship in Islamic jurisprudence reduces a woman’s identity and humanity to the lineage she shares with a male guardian, husband, master. Her existence in society does not have legitimacy unless it is contained, protected by a man. Women are therefore subjugated to men, as women have themselves accepted the role of protectors of guardianship rights, guarding against any potential intruder that might disrupt this peaceful vision.”
In conclusion, al-Selini believes that “Islamist rule in Tunisia has hardened religious patriarchal concepts despite its pretense of allowing the emergence of laws to prevent violence—these are shallow attempts to encourage empowerment, whitewash their period of rule, and appeal to the West. But reality is where we find people’s true mindsets, the modes of thought that internally govern society.”
