By Sharanya Gopinathan
The Corniche is one of Beirut’s most iconic public spaces. This weekend, the famous seafront saw over 30 white wedding dresses hanging from nooses swaying eerily in the wind, strung up by activists protesting Lebanon’s controversial “rape law”.
The law in question is section 522 of Lebanon’s penal code, which contains a caveat that says a rapist can be exonerated if he marries the victim.
Alia Awada, a member of Abaad, the group that organised this protest, said that when an unmarried girl is raped, the judge typically suggests that she marries the rapist to “preserve the family’s honour”. The article has been referred to as a “relic from the Stone Age” by Lebanon’s Minister of Women’s Affairs Jean Oghassabian.
The Parliament’s Administration and Justice Committee agreed to scrap the controversial section, and a draft proposal will be sent to the Parliament in order to officially remove the law from Lebanon’s penal code. Lebanon’s lawmakers will vote on whether or not to repeal this law on the 15th of May, and activists are trying to increase the pressure on them to scrap it through heightened protests and attention in the weeks to come through protest and installations. Each of the hanging dresses in this protest is supposed to symbolise a day of the month on which the woman is raped by her rapist-husband.
This isn’t the first time Beirut’s famous seafront has been home to action against bizarre laws. In mid-2015, an organisation named KAFA held a sort of social experiment to protest Lebanon’s child marriage laws, under which a child above the age of nine can legally be married to a man if her parent’s consent to the marriage. That experiment saw an old-looking dude posing for pictures with a child bride, and captured the various reactions from the crowd. It was interesting to see how different people reacted to it: some people yelled out congratulations to the “husband”, three men threatened to throw him into the sea if he spoke another word, one woman denounced the child’s parents as criminals when she was told that her parents had agreed to this, and another man employed sneaky sign language to tell the child to run away.