Muslim Women’s Group Launches Digital Campaign to Combat Intra-Community Violence During Ramadan

For Fatima Bent, co-president of Lallab, this digital campaign against intra-community violence is a way to reclaim the subject. "It’s often the law of silence. They can’t denounce the attacks they suffer because they’re told they’ll betray the cause and we don’t air our dirty laundry in public," she explains to Radio France.

The association has collected about fifty testimonies from Muslim women on subjects such as incest, the wearing of the veil and related discrimination, or the sexism experienced in the mosque. As part of this digital campaign, Lallab has already published some of these testimonies on its social networks, without revealing the identity of the women. Through this approach, the association wants to allow these women victims of intra-community violence to free their speech, because they are often not believed by their loved ones.

"What do we need for Muslim women to feel safe in mosques, in their families, to be invited to family dinners, without fear of suffering violence because they have spoken?" Fatima Bent also wonders.

Created in 2015, Lallab became known during the summer of 2017 after the publication on its social networks of an announcement for three civic service missions, which had provoked a wave of reactions from defenders of secularism and supporters of the far right who accused it of being too close to the promoters of radical Islam. A campaign of disinformation and harassment, the association had denounced.