Authors
The initiative Mawjoudin for equality is a Tunisian association that fights for equality and the rights of LGBTIQ people.
Damj The Tunisian Association for justice and equality is an organization whose goal is to defend and promote the human rights of the LGBTIQ people in Tunisia.
Chouf is a feminist organization that defends women’s bodily and sexual rights. The organization aims at strengthening the abilities of women coming from sexual, ethnic, economic and cultural minorities. Chouf also establishes the foundations of psychological, judicial and physical support for any woman and persons identifying themselves as such.
Context
Several articles from the Tunisian penal code criminalize sexual and gender minorities (LGBT), though two main ones: article 230 that criminalizes sexual practices between two individuals from the same sex as well as article 226 for « indecent assault ». Although article 226 doesn’t concern LGBT individuals specifically, it is also used against them, mainly against those with a body language and clothing that infringe the dominant social norms and particularly towards transgender individuals. Since 2011 and the proportionate liberation of the media and the civil society field in Tunisia, a certain number of information concerning violence against sexual and gender identity circulated. Despite the fact that these information raised awareness about the situation of these minorities among « human rights » defenders, we didn’t dispose of any source that would quantify and measure violence against them.
Activists advocating for the reform of the penal code are constantly confronted to the « demand of precise statistics », the absence of quantitative data is also used as a disqualification argument. Therefore, a quantitative study becomes essential to assess the extent of this phenomenon. The study, conducted from January until March 2018 by three LGBT organizations (Chouf, Damj and Mawjoudin), then comes to fill a considerable gap. After the description of the methodology of the study, this report will expose the main results, highlighting the systematic nature of violence, while the different mediatized cases might lead us to think that these are exclusively individual and isolated
cases.
(Also in Tunisian and French)
