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12.3 Fadela Amara and the Movement to Improve Immigrant Women’S Lives in France

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12.3 Fadela Amara and the Movement to Improve Immigrant Women’S Lives in France 12.3 Fadela Amara and the movement to improve immigrant women’s lives in France Participation and representation of international migrants and their offspring take many forms. Fadela Amara’s movement was principally directed at violence against women and their subjugation in the heavily immigrant –background banlieues that would explode in 2005 and 2007. Many migrants and migrant-background persons in France found themselves residing in dilapidated suburban housing projects beset with a variety of social ills. Furthermore, this environment engendered increasing levels of violence against young women by young men. Gang rape, house arrest, forced repatriation, forced marriage, compulsory virginity, and the murder of young women viewed as having betrayed their families’ honour became increasingly prominent in the 1990s. One woman’s mission to create social change within the suburban immigrant communities spurred a movement which has helped to improve these women’s lives. Fadela Amara is the daughter of Algerian Muslim immigrants whi grew up in a housing project that was 90 per cent Algerian, and watched its deterioration among third generation immigrants. In October 2002, Sohane Benziane, an 18 year-old Muslim woman living in an immigrant ghetto, was burned to death by a local gang. This murder, which gained widespread attention in the French media, motivated immigrant-origin women like Amara to create feminist community groups in the immigrant ghettos. They discovered: … mounting violence, social breakdown, ghettoization, retreat into sectarian politics, ethnic and sexual discrimination, the powerful return to tradition, the weight of myth about virginity, but also practices like excision and polygamy still [prevalent] in African communities (Amara 2006: 111). The groups adopted the slogan ‘Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ (‘Neither Whores Nor Submissives’) to show that women would no longer be treated in a degrading manner and could fight back. Amara planned urgent action and, with seven others, set out on 1 February 2003 on ‘The March by Neighbourhood Women for Equality and Against the Ghetto.’ The group travelled to 23 locations around France and received overwhelming participation, solidarity, and validation everywhere they went. It is important to note that Amara also wanted to reach out to young men of immigrant background with this movement and that many of these men were very receptive. Participants realized that these men were largely products of their social environments and needed help. The final march, the International Women’s Day, took place in Paris on 8 March 2003 and a crowd of 30 000 people – women, men, young, old, Muslim, Christian, and all political affiliations – joined together to make it a success. Members of Parliament and the Prime Minister met with Amara, who proposed five policy measures to help protect the nation’s women: The preparation of an educational guide on respect for women, written for young people; the urgent creation of shelters for young runaway women; the organization of special reception centres within police stations for victims of male violence; the creation of special neighbourhood ‘listening posts’ where women could go for advice; and the launching of a training program by [the] movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises to educate women organizers for work in the projects.’ All of the recommendations have been enacted in some form, and improvements continue to be made. Ni Putes Ni Soumises groups now operate throughout the country. As a practicing Muslim, Amara believes in the importance of religion, but her position as a militant feminist causes her to feel that the solution for peace and equality lies in a secular society above all. However, France’s attempts to create laws banning blatant religious symbols in public schools, which became known as the ‘no headscarf law,’ showed that the creation of secular laws may cause the reverse effect among immigrant Muslim populations who feel especially targeted and stigmatized by xenophobes. In Amara’s eyes, policies to even out economic opportunities for all residents of French society needed to be created to promote tolerance. In 2007, France’s centre-right President, Nicolas Sarkozy, appointed Amara to be his Junior Minister for Urban Affairs. Two other women of Afro-Muslim background were also added to his cabinet, reflecting the growing diversity within the country. In 2008, Amara played a key role in formulating a much-touted plan to address the issues that led to widespread rioting throughout much of France in 2005 and 2007. References Amara, F., Zappi, S. and Harden Chenut, H. (2006) Breaking the Silence: French Women's Voices from the Ghetto (Berkeley: University of California Press). .
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