RIYADH (Middle East Eye) – Saudi women’s rights activists have launched an online campaign to allow women to share their experiences of being “prisoners” in their own homes and highlight the social restrictions many still face in the conservative kingdom.
On Twitter, activists used the hashtag #HomeDetainees to raise awareness about “women who languish at home”, a place that is both a “woman’s grave and a man’s paradise”.
Activists in Saudi Arabia used the hashtag to demand the abolition of the “male guardianship system”, a structure that essentially gives a woman’s father, brother, or husband the right to decide her fate in terms of “education, work, and healthcare”.
Conjointly, the campaign demanded Saudi women to be granted the right to “movement, independence, and decision-making”, stating that any woman or girl who feels “trapped in her home” should draw strength from the campaign’s experiences.
Women used the platform to express their frustration at their constrained state, with one stating that being trapped at home had “a draining effect on my soul and psyche”.
“My prison suffocates my passions and aspirations. It chokes off my desires, capabilities, ambitions, as well as my character. It rendered me severely depressed and obsessive, as well as afflicted me with thousands of psychological ailments,” wrote the user, who did not use her real name.
Another described life as a woman in Saudi Arabia as akin to being “assaulted with all forms of violence on the psychological, physical, and material level”.
Another testimony likened the feeling of home detention to being an “immobile piece of furniture in a living room”, stating that one “sees their age and youth passing while they are trapped between four walls”.
Saudi women’s rights activists have long campaigned against the restrictive male guardianship system that “controls a woman’s life from birth to death”.
According to Human Rights Watch, such laws are the country’s most significant “barrier to achieving women’s rights”.
Despite cosmetic reforms by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that have allegedly aimed to expand the participation of women in society, HRW and Saudi rights groups maintain that women’s freedom remains “inadequate” and that a woman cannot be independent without her relatives “tracking her down and threatening her with placement in notorious care and hospitality homes”.