I often tried to talk to my husband to figure out why he absolutely resented me. After repeated rejections, he genuinely told me: ‘I can longer come near you. I cannot even look at you. I don’t know what happened to you in prison, and nothing can guarantee that nobody has touched you.’”
Mending what has been broken, women detainees face social stigma after their release from the Syrian prisons. Syria Untold *
After she was freed from a government detention facility, Aliaa wished she had not been released. She realised that living with her husband and restoring their relationship would be impossible. It would be difficult for her to endure the social stigma of being a former woman detainee and the constant questioning by those around her.
She wasn’t alone. A 2020 report by Women Now, a Syrian women’s rights organisation, found that many women survivors of the Syrian detention have faced backlash from their communities following their release from detention. “A key experience shared by the majority of survivors…was the violent reaction to the experience of detention by both close and more distant members of their communities,” according to the report. Some survivors were reportedly forced to marry or put under house arrest by their family members “to wash away the shame.”
In patriarchal societies, women’s bodies are often viewed as private property, and any assault on them is considered an assault on their families. They are held responsible instead of holding the parties who commit violations accountable, especially when the violations are systematic gender-based violence.
After Wissam’s release, she tried to move on with her life: she had only two university exams left to obtain her diploma. But she was not safe from men’s permissive and intrusive attitudes towards her body. “I was standing with my collage colleague when a strong wind blew and displaced my scarf in a way that showed a bit of my shoulder. As he tried to fix my scarf in its place, I told him I did not like anyone touching me. He retorted, ‘You haven’t forgotten their touches in there, have you?’ I was shocked, and I could not speak. I usually have my answers ready, but I was too shocked at that moment. I still remember it, and I do not know what to say. I have no idea what sort of feeling overcame me. Was it disgust or hatred? I do not know. It was a mixed feeling, and I was very hurt,” she says.
“I felt that some people were treating me like a violated property. They thought that if I am a former detainee, then I had been certainly raped and therefore open for any sexual intercourse. Men often make insinuations to engaging in sexual acts with me. Others thought that, since I was a former detainee, men might want to marry me to cover up for my shame and I would owe them for that.” Syria Untold *
“When the Syrian revolution began in 2011, I was studying architecture in the city of Raqqa, in north-east Syria. I was arrested for the first time by the Assad regime after I took part in the demonstrations there, but on that occasion, I was released after 10 days. The second time I was arrested, at a checkpoint near Raqqa in June 2012, it was much more difficult. I had continued my activism and was supporting displaced civilians who had fled the regime’s brutality. The fact that I am a queer made my life even more risky, as the Syrian law criminalises homosexuality.
“In prison, I will never forget a guard named Abu Jasem who took any opportunity he could to torture us detainees. The other detainees were homophobic, so I suffered at the hands of both my jailers and my cellmates. One day, I was beaten up nine times. I can still feel the shame and humiliation vividly. My cellmates refused to sleep around me in our tiny cell and looked at me with disgust. Those experiences have left me with an enduring, destructive emotional pain.”
“There was no difference between ISIS and the regime in how they treated LGBTQIA+ people. Many queer activists did not survive those years. They were either executed or disappeared. To this day, we still have no idea of their whereabouts.” Aljumhuriya *
The news of homicides of women and girls in Syria have not stop spreading through the Syrian alternative media platforms while we have been working on preparing this research. These crimes are considered the last link in an ongoing series of domestic violence that has been deeply rooted in Syrian societies for decades.
Syrian alternative media provided a broader space for the issue of domestic violence and brought it to the surface. This is undoubtedly an essential step towards contributing to ending it. It is a responsibility that the Syrian alternative media does not bear alone, especially in light of its work in relation to the ongoing environment of conflict and in addition to the older discriminatory social and legal structures. Nevertheless, it succeeded for the first time in producing a different discourse in various fields, including social justice. However, it is still important to spot the media practices and note their impacts on the phenomenon of domestic violence.
Accordingly, and departing from the belief in the role of these institutions in influencing and making change, and as a media development institution from a feminist perspective, we at the Syrian Female Journalists Network have been critically monitoring media discourses since 2016. Back then we published the first report to monitor the portrayal of women in emerging media, “Women in emerging Syrian Media: Critical Discourse Analysis”. Since then, the Network’s work has focused on developing media discourse monitoring tools that are compatible with political developments and placing them within their local contexts.
The report studies and observes media patterns and methods in handling issues of domestic violence against women and girls by exploring a sample of emerging/alternative Syrian media institutions and feminist organisations, highlighting their role in reducing or enhancing this social problem and its effects on each of the victims/survivors of violence and the perpetrators. Hence, we seek to understand the extent to which this coverage contributes to the pursuit of social justice and gender equality. This work relies on feminist discourse analysis that combines the theory of critical analysis of media discourse with media theories. This methodology was designed to be in line with the objectives of the research, the specificity of the subject, the Syrian context and the context of the work of the institutions included in the research sample.
The results revealed many positive practices in dealing with issues of domestic violence, represented first in the interest in covering the topic and in digging into its contexts, roots, effects and types that are visible and less visible in society, and advocating for achieving social justice and bridging the gender gap. We also observed the taking-into-account of being sensitive and considerate to victims/survivors of violence.
On the other hand, and in other platforms, the victims/survivors did not escape blame, stereotypes, commodification or silencing. The discourse was not devoid of some logical fallacies that distorted and neglected the reality of domestic violence and depicted it mainly as a private and family affair, or even as a romantic act! Certainly, the political orientations of the institutions affected the formation of their coverage and the formulation of their messages at the expense of the issue itself. The report led to a set of accurate results and examples that can contribute to and help stop and rethink this situation. It opens the door for discussions on how to develop coverage collectively in order to exchange experiences and produce a tone of a media discourse that is more sensitive to victims and survivors of violence, and more effective in contributing to reducing and ending the phenomenon of domestic violence and achieving justice. SFJN *
XwhY is a reader of gender and sexuality related-content that represents the problems and challenges faced by women and LGBTQIA+ communities in Syria and the region.
Since they were united in the embrace, they became two no more
A pair they had become
But we cannot say if a woman or a man they were
They appear sexless
But of two sexes each all the same.Visit page
