Sordid and humiliating act, the rape of women remains topical, especially in African and Arab countries. These countries, of which for some of them and as astonishing as it may seem, rather than judging the rapist, condemn the woman raped to prison sentences or the stoning.
Statistics by María José Alcalá, an activist with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (Unifem), show that in average, in the world, nearly one in five women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape during her existence.
On the other hand, rape affairs, in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or Somalia, remain taboo. They even go so far as to accuse the victim of adultery or blame him for finding himself alone in the company of a man!
The situation is all the more serious when the news becomes “war rape”. Almost no one is talking about it. Even statistics are slow to come.
Since the beginning of the Tunisian popular revolution, which has spread to several other Arab countries, many defenseless women have paid the “bestiality” of the prospective forces.
Thus, in Tunisia, burrs were committed by the Bop forces in Kasserine or Théla, on January 11, 2011, rapes perpetrated on minors barely 14 years old for some and under the eyes of their own family. Other overwhelming testimonies of women raped during the night of the famous January 14, 2011 at the Ministry of the Interior were collected. Without forgetting the sexual assault of Lara Logan, reporter to the American channel CBS.
In Libya, Imen al-Obeidy, Libyan, was the victim of collective rape by the pro Ghadafi militias at a dam at the entrance to Bengazi. Desperate, she burst into a hotel that swarmed foreign journalists in Tripoli. When she started talking about her rape, men and women wanted to silence her and he was brought out of the hotel, despite the vain attempts by journalists to tear her off from the police. We still don’t know where the young woman was taken. The only information available to the media is the declaration of the Libyan government spokesperson who says that this woman was in the grip of alcohol and that she has a mental illness.
The case of Imen al-Obeidy is particular in the sense that she dared to speak of her ordeal but it is clear that the majority of women victims of rape do not denounce their executioners, by shame, modesty or feeling of fear sometimes. These crimes then remain unpunished. But in Tunisia, as in Libya, these rapes are unjustifiable and must be condemned.
