BEITY Tunisia for homeless women

Our Home Association is an organization of civil society non-profit. It is governed by Decree-Law 88/2011 of 24 September 2011 on associations [JORT No. 74 of 30 September 2014].

• Our association was legally registered in the Official Journal of the Republic of Tunisia of the legal and regulatory announcements on 14 April 2012. It bears the registration number 2012R01322APSF1.

• Our association is the daughter of the revolution of December 17 to January 14, 2011 in which it wants to serve the dignity objectives, equality, freedom and social justice.

• We pursue the project to combat by all means against discrimination and economic and social vulnerability specifically affects women.

• We are an association that combines solidarity actions in reception, listening, counseling and accommodation for women victims of discrimination, economic and social violence and exclusion, engaged reflection and pressures for social change and human rights.

• We are a mixed association, composed of women and men, from different backgrounds and who share the same values of human dignity and commitment activist against exclusion.

Why Beity?

• If legal, policy, social, economic and cultural were carried out at the condition of Tunisian women, equal access to rights and the enjoyment by all of a level of dignity is not yet reached.

• Equal access to economic and social rights, ground, property, housing, heritage and legacy still faces obstacles holding attitudes and patriarchal attitudes and the discriminatory rules of law national.

• To add gender discrimination and overlap in practice economic exclusion that often reinforce xenophobia, racism, cultural conservatism, rejection of the other, the rise of violence.

• Public policies of the city and regional planning have widened the gap between regions, social classes and genders making Tunisian cities places of exclusion and concentration of an "informal" housing and vulnerable populations particularly affecting women.

• Institutional responses of public support for vulnerable people is incomplete marked on one side by the weakening of state institutions on the other by the return inclination to "charity" established. Little or nothing is expected towards women.

A meeting

• We went in 2012 to meet the women exclusion in public places, the town center stations, street, building patios, parks, shelters, the shelters.

• We collected their word, listened to their suffering and the trauma they carry and their life stories, their struggles or their renunciations.

• In their testimony, there is an oscillation between acceptance and rebellion, between conformity and transgression. However, over the confidence emerge preserved dignity and resistance strategies by enrolling in the same community, sharing the same pain and the same constraints, still creating social bonds.

• The results of this investigation showed that this situation is multifactorial: economic poverty, isolation, endemic unemployment, the arrival of a child outside marriage, domestic violence and / or family or partner, abandonment , economic exploitation, lack of schooling at a young age, accident and disability, exile, exclusion and family breakdown.

• Many of them live by begging or starch precarious and vulnerable and suffer from deterioration of their physical and moral health. Little or no schooling all, they live in family breakdown and are in socialization trajectories prone to street violence, social stigma. This spiral of exclusion leads home a feeling of social uselessness, of "shame" and low self-esteem and severe mental suffering.

• When asked about their future, they are scarcely aware of the facilities, public or voluntary programs of support and promotion schemes

The survey identified various female figures:

• Mothers with no family support and / or family breakdown.

• Young women roaming without means, in couples a rental nomadism in the room, even a forced prostitution.

• Women victims of domestic violence and / or domestic

• Women Head-e-s-parent families, single mothers, widowed or divorced or whose husband or partner is missing or imprisoned

• Girls runaway for use and threat of domestic violence

• Some workers employed homes who lost their jobs with age

• Women with chronic diseases, abandoned by their families

• Women aged and poor, crowded out of the housing for non-payment

• Ancient detained women, stigmatized and rejected their release.

• Some migrant women without support.

Typology of marginalization

• A forced and imposed marginalization affecting women forced into begging due to poverty, the breakdown of all family ties and violence

• A marginalization "normative", product of social stigma behavior considered "deviant" and suffered, in the case of the species, single mothers or women by selling their bodies to sometimes imprisonment.

• An assumed marginalization that results in either the flight of the family home because of the violence, or by the desire to change and transform its rural past life by adopting a new fashion and life style.

a engagememt

To change that!

• Promoting the rights of women victims of discrimination and violence to decent housing as recognized and protected by the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights.

• Promote women's equal access to heritage, property and housing, as recognized by the International Convention against All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

• Act with the objective of equal recognition of economic and social rights, including the right to decent housing.

• Act against violence, discrimination and exclusion that threaten women.

• Initiate legal solutions and policy of struggle and action against exclusion.

• Defending egalitarian laws, protecting the rights of people including people experiencing risk.

• Supporting women and households headed by a woman at risk.
What is our mission?

• Fight against economic and social vulnerability specifically affects women in that it is an expression of historical relations of domination and discrimination based on the differential valence of the sexes to preserve the dignity of women, strengthening their rights and capacities, promote their skills and potential for action and mobilization, the shelter risks of addiction, break the exploitation and subjugation, by itself find meaning in his life.

• Our specific mission is to strengthen solidarity and recreate the link from our collective and reflective daily practice with women.

• We are committed to act against the feminisation of poverty and social deskilling accompanying and against infringements of rights and equal playing our role of vigilance and alert.

• We aim to make visible the precarious living conditions of women, especially the living conditions of the 'homeless women "that we see as a human rights violation.

• In addition to mobilizing the specific violations of the right to decent housing, Beity denounces social policies deemed ineffective to stop the relations of domination between men and women.

• We strive to change the situation of women, raise public awareness to the issue of human rights in general and housing rights in particular and to develop legislation in the direction of the promotion and respect of these rights.