Yolanda Alba, Forum Femmes Journalistes Méditerranée (FFJM) and Ligue du Droit International des Femmes (LDIF)
Both the Ligue du Droit International des Femmes and the Forum Journalistes de la Méditerranée prioritise in their feminist activism the vindication of the concept of “apartheid by reason of sex” at the international level. In this sense, I want to highlight two important and significant books that must be known because the problem persists today and contribute to our end to eradicate the tremendous discrimination of this system imposed against women. The practice of sex apartheid leads not only to the loss of women’s social and economic power, but also leads to violence and submission.
The tragedy had moved all of France when the press revealed that a young woman had been burned alive, locked in the garbage cans of a block of flats in one of the sleeping cities on the outskirts of Paris, on October 4, 2002, by a cocky and limp teenager who had decided to “punish” her: she refused to obey his order not to be on time in her neighbourhood.
The book tells in great detail the sequence of events, including the minutes of the criminal proceedings and the expert reports, and recounts the hearings at the Créteil Criminal Court and then at Bobigny. The story of Sohane’s friends is poignant.
The tragedy of Sohane Benziane‘s death went down in history: for the first time a crime was declared sexist; and this meant the end of the friendly camaraderie between boys and girls from slums who shared the same social ambitions giving way to the emblematic feminist association “Ni putes ni soumises” and the March of the Youth in 2003.
Everything had changed and the tension was increasing until the 2005 riots set the suburbs on fire. Once again, only the voices of the boys were heard in the media. We know the rest. Twenty years later… in 2021, 122 women died at the hands of men, and 87 this year…
This book could have been called “Sohane, the trial”, because its objective is not to arouse compassion, but to make known and highlight the moment when French society did justice to our sister…
The authors of this book are:
Annie Sugier (1942) nuclear physicist and French feminist activist. She rose to fame in 1989 as the first woman to be promoted to the direction of the Commission on Alternative and Atomic Energy (CEA) of France. She is the current president of the Ligue du Droit International des Femmes.
Linda Weil-Curiel, began her career as a lawyer at the Paris Bar Association in 1973. In 1982, she made a first important effort to ensure that female genital mutilation was recognised as a crime and that its perpetrators were tried in a criminal court. In 2006, she became a civil party in the Sohane Benziane case. It belongs to the She is part of the Commission for the Abolition of Female Genital Mutilation (CAMS) and the LDIF.
The second book proposed is “Femmes engagées” by the Iranian Sorour Kasmaï, a French-Iranian writer and translator, who reflects on her exile and her flight on horseback through the mountains of Kurdistan, her passion for literature and her fight for women’s rights in Iran.
It tells the story of the resistance of Iranian women, marked by emblematic figures and struggles for emancipation against a patriarchal and authoritarian regime. Sorour also shares his commitment through his literary works, in particular his contribution to the collective work of Iranian women “Women, Life, Freedom”.
