Tunis: Psychological violence accounts for 69% of the total reports recorded on the hotline 1899 in 2023, said Minister of Family, Women, Children, and the Elderly Amel Belhaj Moussa. Despite its prevalence, it is rarely discussed, even though it is the root cause of all forms of violence, she was quoted as saying in a department press release.
Belhaj Moussa took the floor during a seminar on the “Mental Health of Women Victims of Psychological Violence,” organised on June 11-12 in Tunis at the initiative of the Ministry of Family, Women, Children and the Elderly and the National Centre for Combating Violence against Women, in partnership with UN Women and the Forensic Medicine Department at the Charles Nicolle Hospital in Tunis.
Some fifty experts in the field of combating violence from Tunisia and abroad including France and Spain, are taking part in the event, alongside members of the steering committee of the “Detection, Response, and Monitoring System for Domestic Violence” project and medical professi
onals.
To combat all forms of violence, she pointed out, the family and the school must play an increasingly active role from childhood onwards, and awareness must be raised through the media in order to instil in young people a rejection of violence in all its forms.
In this connection, she recalled the various measures taken by Tunisia to combat all forms of violence, such as raising the budget allocated to combating violence against women and increasing the number of shelters for women victims of violence, and launching a survey on the ‘profile of perpetrators of violence against women’ (covering a sample of 80 perpetrators of violence) and preparing a survey on media coverage of the phenomenon of violence against women (in terms of the choice of sources and journalistic genres used).
Head of the UN Women Tunisia and Libya office Isadora de Moura affirmed for her part, that violence against women is a ‘global phenomenon’ that takes different forms (such as sexual violence, economic violence, etc.), unde
rlining the impact of moral violence on the mental health of victims (loss of self-confidence, psychological vulnerability and recourse to violence).
According to Article 3 of Organic Law No. 2017-58 of 11th August 2017, on the elimination of violence against women, verbal violence is any verbal aggression, such as defamation, insult, coercion, threat, abandonment, deprivation of rights and freedoms, humiliation, neglect, mockery, belittlement and other acts or words that undermine a woman’s human dignity or are intended to intimidate or dominate her.
Source: Agence Tunis Afrique Presse