Violence Against Women in North Africa

Abstract

This chapter discusses violence against women (VAW) in the six Muslim countries of North Africa, namely, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Mauritania. It provides a comparative framework for assessing existing data on the nature, scope, and severity of VAW in these countries. It further discusses the critical role that women’s right advocates and defenders have played over the last decades in documenting the scope and severity of VAW in their countries. The chapter goes on to evaluate their continuous efforts to raise public awareness and their relentless pressure campaigns targeting policy makers to develop protective legal measures to combat VAW. With rare exceptions, North African states, I contend, have demonstrated a high tolerance for VAW. Although they are all signatories of important international conventions and protocols against VAW, most countries have not committed the necessary political will and resources to combatting it. The chapter ultimately underscores the legal ambiguities and confusion in defining violence against women and discusses the implications this has for women’s lives. It concludes with a discussion of the emerging legal trends in a few countries to criminalize sexual harassment and underline the persistent challenges for ending VAW.