Girls Terrorized in France's Macho High-Rise Ghettos
Fri Feb 28, 9:46 AM ET
By Catherine Bremer
VITRY-SUR-SEINE, France (Reuters) - Dressed like boy rappers, four young women scurry toward their apartment tower home, and try not to think about the 17-year-old girl burned to death in a nearby garbage depot by a local teen-age boy.
Their figures masked by puffy jackets and baggy pants, they steal past some adolescent boys, baseball caps worn backwards, who are kicking a ball hard against a wall across the street.
"Boys and girls don't mix here," explains 19-year-old Sonja.
A short bus ride from Paris, a world capital of romance, teen-age girls trapped in soulless, Soviet-style housing complexes are too scared to wear skirts and balk at the idea of dating.
Imprisoned behind yellowed curtains that hang limply at windows, they stay indoors to avoid the jeers, bullying and the ominous risk of rape that lurks in dingy stairwells where gangs of boys of mostly North African origin hang out.
"It's everywhere, all the time. Beatings, rapes, the lot. The worst is the names they call you, especially if you're dressed in a girly way which makes you a slut," says Amel, 21.
Home to many immigrants from the Maghreb, such suburbs have seen a rise in radical Islam that has turned attitudes toward women even harsher. Pressure is mounting for Muslim women to wear veils and forced marriages that snatch girls from college and a career are now commonplace.
Those that do not conform pay the price.
"The minute you show your face the insults start. You just put your head down and keep walking. The worst thing to do is answer back, because then they get aggressive," says Amel.
Long criticized for creating ghettos of jobless immigrants in a nation where equality was a founding principle, the state housing projects thrown up around France's cities from the 1960s have always provided a breeding ground for violence and crime.
Known in French as "cites," the high-rise estates, crumbling citadels of poverty turned in on themselves, provide would-be gangsters with a maze of shady basements where drug trafficking, dealing in guns and intra-gang fights are rife.
More distressing are the sporadic beatings by youth gangs who stoop low enough to pick on the old and infirm. Hoodlums looking for fun also steal thousands of cars each year, take them for a white-knuckle joy ride then set them ablaze.
As those with jobs move away, resentment grows and men left behind increasingly vent their frustrations on the opposite sex.
"NI PUTES, NI SOUMISES"
Vitry-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb that is striving to create a community spirit around its faded, pastel-colored high-rises, made headlines when Sohane Benziane, 17, was set alight in October by an 18-year-old boy whose friends stood nearby.
The teen-ager told police he was angry with Sohane for snubbing his advances when he lured her into a refuse depot, so he doused her with petrol and threatened her with a lighter.
The tragedy, which left Sohane rolling in agony on a patch of grass to try to extinguish the flames before she later died in hospital, was just the worst in a sea of attacks by minors.
Yet it was horrific enough to spark a feminist revolution that is spreading to hundreds of cites across France.
"My sister was burned because she was rebellious. She broke the rule of the cite which is to be submissive," says Sohane's elder sister, Kahina, in an interview on Web site
http://www.macite.net. "For her killer, she represented a thing. It was like he was vandalizing a car. Well, today, some more of us are rebelling. We are sick and tired of this oppression," she says.
Spurred on by Kahina and others, a group of women is touring towns across France wearing T-shirts with the slogan "Ni Putes, Ni Soumises" -- "Neither potatos nor Submissive."
Their march through cities like Rennes, Toulouse, Marseille and Strasbourg will culminate in Paris on March 8, International Women's Day, with what they hope will be a big rally.
"We need the government to listen to us. The domination by boys is getting worse. We have to break up these ghettos so that women stop suffering," said Fadela Amara, head of the association that is running the march.
A study by her organization has uncovered untold misery, and prompted scores of women to unload their stories of shootings, date-rapes and gang-rapes by teen-age boys, to the public.
"You can't dress like a girl, which I hate. If you smoke or are friends with a boy, you're a slut. And if you sleep with a boy, you're done for -- not that any of us want to go near those jerks," says Sonja, the 19-year-old in Vitry.
MACHOISM FUELS FRUSTRATION
The mayor of Vitry-sur-Seine, who has lived in a tower block there since 1968, rues the collapse of what should be a close-knit, neighborly community into a ghetto ruled by fear where teen-agers have no notion of normal relationships.
"Girls have to choose between being repressed or labeled a slut -- so how can normal relationships flourish?" Alain Audoubert told Reuters in an interview at Vitry town hall.
"The concept of women as objects is back, with trendy strip clubs and glamour magazines, and it's in underprivileged areas where women have less independence that they suffer from that."
Audoubert aims to set up an anonymous counseling center by the end of this year where abused women can discreetly drop in.
And there are other signs of hope -- like a boy who joined the march with a T-shirt reading "Not judgmental, not superior."
But sociologist Sebastien Roche believes the deep-rooted frustrations behind the violence will take time to disappear.
"It's a vicious circle. Boys are getting more and more macho and girls, who prefer gentleness and sensitivity, reject that," he said. "The boys get frustrated and sex attacks happen. Making a stand will help change things, but it won't be overnight."
