There is a Facebook page called “Reasons when it is acceptable to punch a woman in the face.” It has almost 27,000 fans, and is described by its administrators as ‘off-colour humour.’ There is a move afoot to get Facebook to shut it down. To participate, go to the page and click the “report” button, which is located on the left hand side at the bottom of the page.
Latest Updates: violence against women RSS
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johnpi
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abunoor
The two brothers were found guilty of kidnapping 20-year-old Fazeelat Bibi, one of their cousins, in September.
The judge in Lahore also sentenced them to life in prison.
Sentence was passed on Monday under a rarely invoked Islamic law dating from the 1980s. In the past similar sentences have been revoked on appeal.
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johnpi
A Danish public service announcement against domestic violence is drawing outrage and criticism from around the world. The online-only interactive PSA is in the form of a game called “Hit the bitch.”
In it, the viewer uses the computer’s mouse to use a virtual hand to slap the woman in the video. The site has a ranking in each corner – one for “pussy” and one for “gangsta.” The viewer starts the game with a 100% “pussy” rating, but each blow to the woman – who becomes progressively more bruised and battered – causes the “gangsta” rating to go up and the “pussy” rating to go down.
The game ends when the “gangsta” rating reaches 100% at which point the viewer is show the woman lying on the ground swollen, bruised, bleeding and crying.
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johnpi
Saudiwoman blogs about the issue of runaway girls and women in Saudi Arabia, but she starts with this description of life in ultra-conservative Saudi families.
Ultra-conservative Saudi families, and they are a majority, have a general dynamic that few Saudis could deny. Like old-fashioned western family ideologies, the father is the breadwinner, the mother takes care of the home-front, the sons are served and tolerated and the daughters are the bit of fluff that flutters around the house.
But unlike most other cultures, daughters also have to contend with constant supervision of their every move. A job that some brothers feel falls on their shoulders. No matter what age a woman is, many families believe that as long as she is single, she is a liability. This translates into horrific intrusions of privacy and personal freedom. In one extreme case, a family I know has no locks on any of the doors including the bathroom doors, so that to insure the daughters cannot seclude themselves and do anything inappropriate; pre-approval of clothing, whether at home or when leaving the house, is common.
A friend of mine once told me she had to sit for over two hours in an uncomfortable position because she had pajama pants on and was afraid her father, who had come early from work, would see them. And this is not only with teenage girls, but also adult women… even divorced mothers. So what’s a girl to do in this situation? Many go by the Arabic saying that translates into “a woman has only three places in this world: her family’s home, her husband’s home or her grave”.
So the majority wait patiently for their knight to rescue them, others commit suicide and a few run away.
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johnpi
Sharia law meets “Girls Gone Wild” – Salon on latest Shabaab outrage.
Clearly, al Shabaab’s outrage over women’s underthings tracks with its general modesty initiative. What of the bra removal and jiggling of breasts, though? It might seem counter-intuitive to any modesty campaign, but such shaming is an essential part of keeping women’s bodies under wraps. Forcing a woman to put on such a show in public is humiliating and reputation damaging. These are just the things al Shabaab would like to associate with women’s sexuality.
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johnpi
Somali hardliners whip women for wearing bras.
Somalia’s hardline Islamist group al-Shabaab has publicly whipped women for wearing bras they say violate Islam by constituting a deception, north Mogadishu residents said on Friday.
….Residents said gunmen had been rounding up any woman seen with a firm bust and then had them publicly whipped by masked men. The women were then told to remove their bras and shake their breasts.
“Al-Shabaab forced us to wear their type of veil and now they order us to shake our breasts,” a resident, Halima, told Reuters, adding that her daughters had been whipped on Thursday.
“They first banned the former veil and introduced a hard fabric which stands stiffly on women’s chests. They are now saying that breasts should be firm naturally, or just flat.”
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johnpi
Krista at MMW begins a conversation about the recent killing of three sibling girls and their mother in Canada. I really appreciate her approach to this incident, relative to some other coverage there (Aqsa Parvez) which I felt was more purely a defensive response. Krista wants to challenge media coverage that dogwhistles anti-Muslim generalizations and prejudice while not sweeping aside the underlying issues within the Muslim community either.
From an update:
…my original goal for this post was actually to use this article as a starting point for trying to figure out how to have these conversations about violence within Muslim communities, in ways that address the violence properly and fully, without feeding into perceptions of Muslims as all uniquely violent/patriarchal/oppressive in ways that other religious and/or cultural communities aren’t. I wanted to come back to a question of how to engage with some of the more problematic media representations without ignoring the actual problems that are happening.
She’s bringing up something that I think must be a central issue for other Muslim bloggers, and certainly something that I think about when I post here at TI.
Particular to my own situation as a convert, I want to discuss, address and confront issues in the Muslim community that diminish my iman and tend to drive me away from Islam in order to recover myself to the religion and not get stuck, but I don’t want to feed the Jafis and the general prejudices of the society against Muslims in the process.
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johnpi
The invasion of Afghanistan in the name of women’s rights is not going well.
Report: More young girls face rape in Afghanistan.
Rapes targeting girls as young as seven are on the increase in Afghanistan where conditions for women are little better than under the Taliban, the U.N. and rights groups say.
In its annual report on human rights, the U.N. warned conditions were deteriorating in the war-ravaged country despite U.S.-led efforts after the 2001 removal from power of the hardline militia.
“Violence is tolerated or condoned within the family and community, within traditional and religious leadership circles, as well as the formal and informal justice system,” said Navi Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.
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johnpi
‘Slut shaming’ and the victimology of rape.
In the UK Telegraph, an article claims new research shows provocatively dressed women are more likely to get raped. The “scientists” in question are actually a dissertation student, who said her unpublished research would not support the conclusion reached by the newspaper.
Furthermore, as blogged by Natasha Chart, actual research on this specific question (who gets targeted for rape) has been published:
Conventional wisdom holds that women who dress provocatively draw attention and put themselves at risk of sexual assault. But studies show that it is women with passive, submissive personalities who are most likely to be raped-and that they tend to wear body-concealing clothing, such as high necklines, long pants and sleeves, and multiple layers. Predatory men can accurately identify submissive women just by their style of dress and other aspects of appearance. The hallmarks of submissive body language, such as downward gaze and slumped posture, may even be misinterpreted by rapists as flirtation. …
Chart concludes, “A rape culture that blames women who step out of line as ‘asking for’ rape would in fact create more victims by this sort of evaluation. It would create more women whose body language suggests that they’re afraid of being looked at, whose posture is fearful and cringing, who are afraid of the negative judgment, keep their heads down and shuffle meekly along.”
So what would a culture look like that “instilled such confidence in young women that they would legitimately be less likely to be attacked?” Chart asks. It might look like the Amish:
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abunoor
News from the neocon paradise, the magical secular pro-American Kurdish areas of Iraq:
‘Honor killings’ are among the primary causes of unnatural deaths among women in the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq, and a number of reports are also documenting the practice of female genital mutilation. Medical personnel operating in Iraqi Kurdistan and women’s rights activists report that incidents of self-immolation are on the increase, with at least one case reported daily and many more remaining either unreported or concealed as accidents.
May Allaah (swt) and the righteous believers protect and defend all our sisters.
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thabet
Heroic Defenders Of Afghanistan Watch: School girls are attacked with battery acid in Kandahar.
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Fatemeh
A Pakistani senator defends the honor-killing of five women: “these are our norms which should not be highlighted negatively.”
