Photo by @joellehatem - click on it for the full album

Thank you to everyone who joined us yesterday at the demonstration to Protect Women from Family Violence!

Check out some of the press coverage today: Al Akhbar, Daily Star, L’Orient le Jour, AsSafir, Al Balad, Al Diyar, Al Moustaqbal, and Al Joumhouriya.

You can also check out the #protectwomen hashtag on twitter for the live updates.

I estimate that we must have been around 800 protesting yesterday – very diverse crowd. The presence of lots of political parties provoked mixed reactions from the feminists, some applauding their participation in the demo (which is a rarity in Lebanon) and others thought their presence was hypocritical and tainted what should have been a people’s march. I personally don’t like marching alongside any party for whatever cause because I dislike all of them, but I respect Kafa’s decision to involve them as partners in the campaign. If there’s any organization in Lebanon that can bring very different groups together at the same table, it’s Kafa, and that requires hard work and guts, so kudos to them.

It was a little disappointing to see that the largest coalition of our women’s movement could only bring together hundreds of people. We are a long way from becoming a mass movement. And certainly the worst thing about the march was the chant “Rfa3 eedak, koun rijjeil” (targetted at parliamentarians). Shou ossitna we still endorse the idea of “being a man?”

All in all, it was a successful demo and we’ll keep our eyes on the developments of the proposed law.