Tunisia: Doxxing - a New Tool of Repression Against Arab Women
24July 2022
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Tunisia: Doxxing - a New Tool of Repression Against Arab Women
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Gaza’s women and girls see no escape from violence
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‘The law of the jungle’: Afghan women live in terror after US withdrawal
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Nagpur: Widow, daughters asked to vacate house for embracing Islam
•
Taliban claims closure of girl’s school “temporary”, says not a “permanent ban”
•
Meet Kuwaiti woman in UAE on a mission to end stigma against mental illness in
the Arab world
Compiled by New
Age Islam News Bureau
URL:
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Tunisia:
Doxxing - a New Tool of Repression Against Arab Women
By
Menna A. Farouk
24
JULY 2022
As
Tunisia votes in a controversial referendum, rights campaigners say more must
be done to protect women from online abuse and harassment
-------------
Cairo
- When dozens of Tunisian judges went on strike last month to protest the
sacking of 57 of their colleagues, lurid posts containing damaging allegations
about some of the female jurists began appearing on Facebook.
One
said police had ordered a virginity test to be carried out on one of them in
2020, attaching an image purporting to be the medical report. Another targeted
judge Khaira bin Khalifa, saying falsely that she had once been charged with
adultery, a crime in Tunisia.
"I
was destroyed, and my family was defamed for the sake of settling personal
scores," Bin Khalifa told an emergency meeting of the Tunisian Judges
Association.
The
judges' strike began after the mass sacking of judges in early June by
President Kais Saied, who called Monday's referendum over a new constitution
that would formalise his sweeping seizure of powers.
In
Tunisia and other Arab states, the malicious posting of personal information on
social media - known as doxxing - is increasingly being used to harass and
intimidate women, anti-government protesters and LGBTQ+ activists.
"Doxxing
is a repressive tactic, especially when used against the most vulnerable in
society such as women and queer activists," said Marwa Fatafta from Access
Now, a digital rights group.
"Essentially,
your personal information is turned into a weapon pointed against you,"
said Fatafta, the organisation's policy manager for the Middle East and North
Africa (MENA) region.
The
increasing presence of women online and the rising popularity of social media
platforms such as Facebook and Twitter has made doxxing and other forms of
online harassment such as so-called revenge porn and sextortion more
widespread.
A
U.N. Women survey last year of eight Arab nations including Jordan, Lebanon,
Morocco and Tunisia found about half of female internet users felt unsafe due
to online harassment.
"Online
violence represents a serious threat to the women's physical safety and mental
wellbeing," the report said, adding that many women who were targeted
opted for self-censorship or withdrew from online spaces altogether.
A
2017 Tunisian law addressing violence against women contains a broad definition
of violence, including economic, sexual, political and psychological abuse.
Egypt,
Lebanon and Saudi Arabia also penalise harassment on social media platforms,
while Morocco's Penal Code refers to various types of online violence.
"The
authorities do not enforce the laws," said El-Saeed, noting that many
women were too scared to report online sexual abuse - fearing social stigma and
protracted legal proceedings that often lead nowhere.
During
the last year, two Egyptian teenagers died by suicide after being blackmailed
with threats to post intimate photographs online.
Several
women journalists and activists in the region had their intimate photos and
chats leaked online last year after their devices were hacked with Pegasus spyware.
The
doxxing attacks on the protesting judges were the latest such incidents in
Tunisia since Saied moved against parliament last summer, giving himself the
right to rule by decree.
Pro-government
groups shared the photos, phone numbers and home addresses of dozens of women
and LGBTQ+ protesters in a bid to silence them, said Fatafta.
In
some cases, however, doxxing has been used in the region to hold public
officials to account. Activists in Lebanon shared the personal details and
real-time locations of politicians they blamed for the country's financial
collapse.
But
in lieu of effective state measures to tackle harmful doxxing, digital rights
groups and local activists are leading efforts to clamp down on the practice.
Access
Now has a digital security helpline to support activists and journalists, and
flags doxxing cases to social media platforms - lobbying them to make it easier
for victims to report.
The
nonprofit - which has about 980,000 followers on Facebook and 10,000 followers
on Instagram - receives hundreds of messages every day from women who are being
blackmailed or abused online, said founder Mohamed Elyamani.
Source:
All Africa
https://allafrica.com/stories/202207240002.html
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Gaza’s
women and girls see no escape from violence
AFP
July
24, 2022
Palestinians
Suleiman and Nazmiya Baraka show a picture of their slain daughter Istabraq
Baraka, who was killed by her husband last year, on June 27, 2022 in their
home, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. (AFP)
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ABASSAN,
Palestinian Territories: Seventeen-year-old Istabraq Baraka fell pregnant soon
after her wedding in the Gaza Strip. Three months later her husband killed her.
Sitting
with her husband Suleiman in a garden in Abassan, near the city of Khan Yunis
in the south of the Palestinian territory, the 53-year-old talks at lightning
speed about last year’s killing of one of her two daughters, as well as the
loss of an unborn grandchild.
Sitting
with her husband Suleiman in their garden in the south of the Gaza Strip,
Nazmiya Baraka talks about last year's killing of her pregnant 17-year old
daughter. (AFP)
He
laments the slow pace of legal proceedings since his daughter’s husband handed
himself in to the police shortly after the killing.
Femicide
is on the rise in Gaza, according to figures from the Women’s Center for Legal
Aid and Counselling, a Palestinian civil society group.
The
organization registered six killings and suspicious deaths related to domestic
violence in 2019, a figure which rose to 19 the following year.
UN
Women said the situation worsened at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in
2020, which resulted in the “lockdown of survivors of violence with their
abusers.”
Ayah
Alwakil, a lawyer from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said women can
consider violence from their husbands normal behavior in Gaza’s patriarchal
society, which has been controlled by the Hamas Islamist group since 2007.
The
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said 38 percent of women in Gaza faced
physical or psychological violence from their husbands in 2019, but Alwakil
estimated the true figure to be far higher.
Men
convicted of killing their wives can be jailed or face the death penalty. But
the sentence is reduced if they commit a so-called “honor killing,” in which a
relative is murdered because they are deemed to have brought shame to the
family.
“Her
husband tied her up and left her at home so that she couldn’t escape and get
out. When he returned she was dead,” said her brother Abdelaziz, who shares his
sister’s green eyes.
“We
feel satisfied with the death sentence ruling against the husband, five months
after the heinous crime, but we demand the sentence be enforced quickly,” said the
28-year-old.
Fifteen
years since the Israeli-led blockade of Gaza began, it is almost impossible for
women fleeing violence to leave the Palestinian enclave.
When
AFP visited one of them, a woman with bruises covering one side of her face sat
in a corner. She was about to return to her husband, rather than risk losing
access to her children.
“The
law is not on women’s side all the time in the Gaza Strip,” said Aziza
Elkahlout, a spokeswoman for the social development ministry which runs one of
the refuges.
“We
thought of opening the safe house because of the injustice women are exposed
to,” she added, blaming the Israeli blockade for Gaza’s dire living conditions.
Source:
Arab News
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2128261/middle-east
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‘The
law of the jungle’: Afghan women live in terror after US withdrawal
By
Hollie McKay
July
23, 2022
Women
sheathed in Talban-required head-to-toe coverings wait for food relief in Kabul
this month. Asyeah Jassor (above left) and Saira Saleem told The Post how their
lives have changed after the US withdrew from their country last year.
--------------
Saira
Saleem, a 23-year-old journalist from Jalalabad, divides her life into two
parts: before and after America’s 2021 pullout from Afghanistan. Her voice
cracks with grief as she confesses that many people in her country have
expressed suicidal thoughts — a concept deeply frowned upon in Islamic
societies.
Before
the US left, “life was good. We participated in the government, and we worked
in every field. Now, it is very hard to work outside [without harassment],”
said Saleem, who no longer works as a journalist but as a mental
health-counselor for an NGO. “Women can’t attend university unless they wear a
full burqa. And the humanitarian situation is so bad.”
It’s
been almost a year since the US finally withdrew from Afghanistan on Aug. 30
after occupying the country for more than two decades. The Biden administration’s
hasty removal of US troops led to chaotic scenes at Kabul’s international
airport, with Afghans clamoring to leave before the Taliban took over. At least
170 people and 13 American service members were killed by twin ISIS-K suicide
bombs at the airport’s gates. And while more than 100,000 Afghans were
airlifted out of the country, it is believed that up to 80,000 Afghan allies
who worked in some capacity to support the US mission are still left in limbo.
Now,
for the millions of women and girls left behind, the place no longer feels like
home. Their nation has been plunged into antiquity, back to a time when women
were relegated to a dank basement, their faces buried beneath a sea of burqas.
In May, the Vice and Virtue Ministry of the Taliban ordered all women in the
country to cover themselves head to toe, including female TV news anchors.
Taliban
leaders have also banned girls from going to school beyond grade six. Although
they say they believe in women’s rights and want to return girls to education,
they claim they must first ensure that females are transported to school
separately and safely from males, and appropriate uniform policies are
established. None of this has happened yet.
Asyeah
Jasoor, a 22-year-old human rights activist from the once heavy-resistance
enclave of Panjshir, said her existence has been upended since the takeover
last August.
“[The
Taliban] stop you and ask you where is your mahram [escort], and women cannot
go out freely after 8 p.m.,” she said. “Previously, we were going to
supermarkets during this time, but now the Taliban stops you and wants to know
where you are going.”
Before
the withdrawal, “I had a job. I was going to university for my studies, and all
my brothers and sisters had jobs and were studying,” she said. “Now, everything
has stopped. Right now, the life cannot be called a life. Yet somehow, we are
forced to live it.”
Afghanistan
has around 40 public universities, and while most have reopened, not all cater
to both genders. And the universities that have dared to remain open to women
have implemented a variety of restrictions, Jasoor said.
“They
changed our class times” to too early mornings and alternating days, “and most
of us could not go all the time so most of the girls have stopped going,” she
said. “They enforced the black hijab on us — a black hijab in this hot weather
and also the burqa.”
Source:
Ny Post
https://nypost.com/2022/07/23/afghan-women-live-in-terror-one-year-after-us-withdrawal/
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Nagpur:
Widow, daughters asked to vacate house for embracing Islam
Jul
24, 2022
NAGPUR:
Relatives and several members of the Hindu community have asked a widow and her
two daughters to vacate their home in Kamptee, after news of the trio embracing
Islam a month ago came to light. An unfounded fear of mass conversion has
gripped the sensitive area, in the outskirts of Nagpur, after the development.
Kamptee
had earlier witnessed a flare-up after derogatory posts targeting a community
had surfaced on social media, followed by a post supporting BJP’s expelled
spokesperson Nupur Sharma. Weeks after the communal tension, the latest
incident has left security agencies on tenterhooks.
Sources
from Kamptee said the woman’s husband had suffered a paralytic attack and
eventually passed away around a couple of years ago, leaving the economically
weak family in dire straits. With her daughters in college, the woman was
struggling to make ends meet.
The
family began depending on the support of a young Muslim shop owner in front of
their house, whom she started calling her ‘son’. The youth also allowed the
family to use his shop premises, before shifting elsewhere to a bigger
facility.
When
the woman and her daughters decided to embrace Islam, all hell broke loose. The
youth was squarely blamed for the family’s religious conversion. “We have a
family-like bond which has nothing to do with Islam. Until someone has a
deep-rooted affinity and attraction for Islam, the religion doesn’t accept such
a conversion,” said the businessman.
“I
share a mother-son relationship with the woman and call her daughters my
‘sisters’. All I did was to extend some moral support to the family,” added the
youngster, who got married in December last year in his community.
The
shop owner said the widow’s relatives wanted her to vacate her home, and that
there was a daily influx of visitors who asked her to return to Hinduism. “Some
adult citizens have chosen a faith as their constitutional right. Why should
anyone ask them to choose something else,” asked the young man, who is still
supporting the family, earning the wrath of the Hindu community there.
Meanwhile,
radical right-wing Hindu activists said religious conversions were rampant in
Kamptee. “We had to convince a few youths to remain affiliated to their native
community and not convert,” said an activist, attracting the attention of
security agencies.
Old
Kamptee police station senior inspector Rahul Sire, who initiated peace talks
and negotiations between members and leaders of both communities, said cops had
been seeking names and details of the people who had converted and the ones who
were motivating them to, but nothing had come to fore so far.
Sire
said that repeated meetings and negotiations between the two communities had
helped the police to maintain peace. “We are closely monitoring the locality
where the woman and her daughters stay,” he added. “There is a property dispute
between the widow and her relatives who live in a neighbouring plot, but police
will not interfere unless there is a complaint,” the senior inspector said.
Source:
Times Of India
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Taliban
claims closure of girl’s school “temporary”, says not a “permanent ban”
24
July, 2022
Kabul
[Afghanistan], July 24 (ANI): The Taliban on Saturday claimed that the closing
of girls’ schools above sixth grade was “temporary” adding that it was not a
“permanent ban.”
In
an interview with CGTN TV, the spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, Abdul Qahar
Balkhi said, “this suspension is a temporary suspension, and it is not a
permanent ban, it has never been called a ban.”
Defending
the Taliban, he said that the strict views of most Afghan people on the issue
of education and women caused the girls’ schools to remain closed, reported
Tolo News.
“There
is a large percentage of society that has very strict ideas of what women can
do and what they cannot do, and for that reason, the government is trying to
take an approach that is gradual, it takes those people that do not understand
some of the basic Islamic rights of Afghan citizens or of any human being, and
the human rights, to try to convince them. It is due to lack of knowledge of
that part of the society,” he said.
Meanwhile,
girls who have been prevented from going to school for more than eleven months
are asking the Taliban to reopen schools for them, reported Tolo News.
“If
a government wants to have a progressive and developed society, there is no
other way except with education and interaction with the community,” said
Waheeda Adalatjo, university lecturer.
It
has been over 300 days since girls’ schools have been closed, Kabul’s officials
have said that it depends upon the order of the leader of the Taliban.
The
Taliban regime in Afghanistan has drawn heavy criticism across the world for a
decree banning girls from school above grade sixth.
Meanwhile,
the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) report highlighted
that women’s rights have eroded in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover.
The
report stated that the erosion of women’s rights has been one of the most
notable aspects of the de facto administration to date. Before the Taliban came
to power, women and girls had progressively had their rights to fully
participate in education, the workplace and other aspects of public and daily
life.
However,
these rights have been restricted and in many cases completely taken away
following the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
A
decision taken by the Taliban prevented girls from returning to secondary
school which meant that a generation of girls will not complete their full 12
years of basic education. At the same time, access to justice for victims of
gender-based violence has been limited by the dissolution of dedicated reporting
pathways, justice mechanisms and shelters, it added.
Source:
The Print
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Meet
Kuwaiti woman in UAE on a mission to end stigma against mental illness in the
Arab world
Anjana
Kumar
July
24, 2022
Dubai:
A Kuwaiti woman in Dubai is on a mission to remove the stigma around mental
health issues in the Arab world.
Latifah
Al Essa, who is a cognitive psychologist with a career spanning over a decade,
has founded a platform called Ayadi (which means helping hands in Arabic) to
help people in need of mental healthcare in the region.
“Mental
health is a widespread concern in our region, and a highly stigmatised topic
that is inadequately discussed and addressed. Within the GCC alone,
approximately 15 per cent of the population is believed to suffer from mental
health problems at any given time, and the numbers continue to increase. This
is a conservative figure considering the stigma surrounding the topic and the
difficulties people face when opening up about mental health.”
She
added: “I have been on both sides of the spectrum – coming to mental health
from the perspective of both a therapist and as an individual seeking support.
I created Ayadi in the wake of my grandfather having to come to terms with
Alzheimer’s disease. This was life-changing for him and my family, but beyond the
disease itself, a huge challenge was finding therapists who could offer
support.”
Latifah
said that everyone touched by mental health issues is affected in different
ways and has their own story, but there are times when all need help to
navigate life’s challenges.
“Sometimes
friends and family are enough, but at other times, the confidential,
non-judgemental support of licensed experts may provide a safer space for
individuals that otherwise feel uncomfortable with opening up, or who may very
well face stigma in doing so,” she added.
Before
founding Ayadi, Latifah spent six years working as a cognitive psychologist at
the Kuwait Centre for Mental Health, where she provided individual and group
therapy sessions for children and adolescents. She conducted monthly workshops
related to eating, mood and neurodegenerative disorders. During her tenure,
Latifah said she founded the first psychoeducation programme for adult patients
with depression and bipolar disorders, and introduced group therapy sessions
for addiction.
Latifah
also worked at Fawzia Sultan Healthcare Network and Soor Centre for
Professional Therapy and Assessment, where she additionally provided individual
counselling for autistic children.
It
was when she volunteered for Ataa Relief in Syrian refugee camps that she began
to think of an app for mental health care. At the camp she delivered group
therapy sessions for adolescents and assisted with art therapy for children.
Ayadi
connects people with a network of licensed and bilingual mental health experts
through an easy-to-use web and mobile app via video, voice and text-based
sessions. The platform’s mental health experts “understand the region’s social
and cultural nuances”, and provide a HIPAA-compliant therapy service that the
users can trust.
“Through
a combination of online therapy and community support, the platform offers a
safe and secure space for people to talk about mental health and the challenges
they face in their daily lives,” Latifah said.
“Ayadi
brings down the barriers to seeking support by making the experience easier and
more convenient for users. To start with, our community is a safe space for
people to talk freely, connect with others with similar experiences. The
platform helps to learn about mental health, and ask experts for advice. Users
can also book video or voice sessions with over 50 bilingual mental health
experts – all from the convenience of their own space.”
Essa
said when she started work on Ayadi, she first began with informal groundwork,
researching how to create a start-up, educating herself on the mechanics of
running a business, learning about product development, and speaking to
potential users and partners. Ayadi was officially launched in October 2020.
“In
the last few years, there has been a clear shift though in the perception of
the traditional gender roles and a drive towards empowering women in the
region, but there is still a big gap to be bridged,” said Latifah, who also
volunteered for the UK charity Attend, where she coached rehabilitated patients
with non-progressive brain injuries on transitioning back into employment.
“The
fundraising challenges for female entrepreneurs are prevalent not only
regionally but globally. This is an ongoing obstacle to progress, and change
will only occur once awareness of the institutional and social biases at work
leads to tangible action and the creation of more equitable financing
frameworks – including better support for female-led ventures,” she said.
Source:
Gulf News
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URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/tunisia-doxxing-arab-women/d/127556