Samira Bellil
Samira Bellil (November 24, 1972 - September 7, 2004) was a French Muslim feminist activists and campaigner for the rights of Muslim girls and women.
Bellil became famous in France with the publication of her autobiographical book Dans l'enfer des tournantes (translated as In the hell of the tournantes (gang-rapes)) (2002). The book discusses the violence she and other young women endured in the predominently muslim immigrant suburb of Paris, where she was repeatedly gang-raped as a teenager by gangs led by people she knew, and then abandoned by her family and friends. Her book is a portrayal of the predicament of young girls in the immigrant French suburbs.
Bellil was born to Algerian parents in Algiers, but her family migrated to France and settled in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Sainte-Denis. Her father was jailed almost immediately and she was fostered by a family in Belgium for five years, before being called back to her parents "like a package". She found her father violent and distant, and her home life was not happy.
Activism
Soon after publishing her book, her parents threw her out in shame, and her neighbourhood rejected her[1]. Her book put the light on the difficulties girls face in the heavily immigrant and mainly Muslim cité. She wrote how, in the neighborhoods she came from, women who did not appear sufficiently "chaste" were considered in part to deserve the violence that was sometimes visited upon them. She underwent a course of psychotherapy.
Some have suggested that a combination of "cultural attitudes towards women" and bleak financial and social prospects for men in the suburbs, which are composed mainly of first-generation French citizens from Tunisia, Algeria, Spain and sub-Saharan Africa, are responsible for the increasing sexual violence seen there. [2]
Bellil became close to the movement of "Ni putes ni soumises" (Neither whores nor subjected) and wrote her testimony in her book. She denounced the the collective rapes (tournantes) and described how she overcame both her traumatic experiences and the need for revenge. She dedicated the book to her "girlfriends, so that they realize that one can overcome the traumatic" and to Boris Cyrulnik, her therapist.
In part due to Bellil's book and the activism of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, the French government and the mayor's office in Paris began investigating the problem of violence against young women in French immigrant communities.
Bellil was chosen as one of the new Mariannes, the new faces of France. Her portrait has been hung outside the French national assembly.
In 2005 a French school in l’Île-Saint-Denis has been named in her honor Ecole Samira Bellil
She later became a teacher; she died on 7 September 2004 of stomach cancer in Paris. She was 31.
See Also
Additional sources
- CBS News: Article on Samira Bellil
- Time Magazine: Articles on Gang Rapes
- The Guardian: Gang rape on rise among French youth
- The Guardian: Article on Samira Bellil
- BBC News: France in shock over gang rape
- The Australian: Tournantes in Australia
- Sydney Morning Herald: Muslim gang rapes in Sydney Australia
- CNN Transcript: Muslim Women Rebel In France
- ABC News: Paris gang rape trial begins
- Book review Neither whores nor submissives and In gang-rape hell
- Vanity Fair:Daughters of France , Daughters of Allah
- Newsweek: Sexism in the cites