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State Response to Domestic Violence in Algeria

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State Response to Domestic Violence in Algeria

State Response to Domestic Violence in Algeria

25th April 2017

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“Salwa” is a 39-year-old woman from Annaba with two children and a long history of abuse by her husband. She told Human Rights Watch that he started beating her from the early days of their marriage in 2006. She said she endured this treatment for years and never went to the police because she was too afraid of him. In September 2011, he hung her by the arms to a bar in the ceiling of their house with an iron wire and stripped her naked. He took a broom and beat her with it. He then lacerated her breasts with scissors, she said.

Bleeding and screaming, Salwa fainted. When she woke up, she discovered that her sister-in-law had come in. She freed Salwa from the wire, gave her something to wear, opened the door of the house, and told her to flee. She ran until she came to a hospital. The police guarding the hospital escorted her inside. At the emergency unit, they gave her first aid care but told her she could not stay. The police at the hospital took her to a police station. She had visible bruises, blood on her clothes, and her face was swollen from his beatings. She filed a complaint and accepted the police’s offer to take her to a shelter. They first took her to a state shelter for homeless people. Finding the shelter “overcrowded, not clean,” Salwa went to another in Annaba, one run by a nongovernmental organisation.

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When she felt physically able to leave the shelter, she went to the police to inquire about her complaint. They told her, “we called your husband, he said you fell and that is why you are bruised.” The police did not conduct any further investigation, such as summoning her husband for interrogation at the police station or arresting him, Salwa said.

With the help of the association running the shelter, she hired a lawyer and filed another complaint against her husband for assault. She said that a court eventually sentenced him to a fine and six months’ suspended imprisonment.

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She filed for divorce twice, each time on the grounds of physical harm. The first time, in 2012, the court rejected her request for divorce and ordered her to return to the conjugal home. A year later, the court granted her request for divorce and ordered her husband to pay alimony.  When he did not comply, she filed a complaint against him. She said the court sentenced him to six months in prison and a fine, but he went into hiding and the police said they could not find him.

As of April 2016, Salwa was still living in the shelter with no other place to go, bitter about the state’s response to her ordeal.

Salwa’s experience illustrates some of the ways that Algerian authorities fail to provide adequate support, protection, and remedies to survivors of domestic violence.

Lack of due diligence from the police in conducting initial investigations of the abuse, lack of enforcement of sentences, and economic dependence on the abusers combine to present domestic violence survivors in Algeria with an uphill struggle.

Human Rights Watch documented cases of both physical and psychological violence. Women told Human Rights Watch about instances in which perpetrators: shoved them; broke their teeth or limbs; caused concussions and skull fractures; beat them with belts and other objects; beat them while pregnant; threatened to kill them; and verbally humiliated them.

Report by the Human Rights Watch

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