The Juridification of Care and the Navigation of Sentiment in Post-Dictatorship Tunisia
By Ola Galal
Dounia, a 29-year-old woman, stood in the middle of the hallway of the Al-Zohour shelter for battered women in central Tunisia, proudly displaying a dress that she had sown during her eight-week stay after deciding to leave her abusive husband. “This couldn’t have been possible without your support,” she said as she lovingly looked at Mejda, the director of the shelter, and Mounira, a social worker and trainer. “All those new concepts and laws that you taught me helped me regain confidence in myself,” Dounia said, referring to the legal literacy and economic empowerment workshops the shelter organized for its residents as part of a wider national program to address violence against women after a popular revolt ended the country’s brutal dictatorship in 2011. Seven years later when I started my fieldwork, I was struck by the way “rights talk” were everywhere with activists and ordinary Tunisians referring to the law as some sort of barometer for the success of the revolution.
While Dounia’s comments may at first sound like a cliché that is often repeated by participants of “women’s empowerment” workshops, her confession of transformation is nevertheless indicative of a particular reconfiguration of care work after the end of president Zine El Ben Ali’s 23-year-long autocratic rule. In this blog post, I will ethnographically examine and analyze the process of the juridification of care and the implications thereof in post-dictatorship Tunisia. As care became a legal category, it opened up as well as foreclosed possibilities for political action and moral personhood, and reconstituted self, community, and labor amid great uncertainty during the transition to democracy. I do so by analyzing the text of Law 58, or the Violence Against Women Act, in juxtaposition with interactions at a shelter for battered women during which I observed the affective life of the law as it shapes and is shaped by its subjects; women victims of violence, feminist activists, and social workers.

Law 58: The Violence Against Women Act
When Ben Ali was ousted in a mass popular uprising 2011, Tunisia embarked on sweeping legal reforms that aimed to remedy the wrongs of the past and establish a new order and a more just future. This was done through the adoption of a global human rights framework into the formerly authoritarian state apparatus, with feminist activists playing the key role of mediators between international law and local bureaucratic practices. Law 58 was born out of these efforts. The passing of Law 58 marked a turning point in the state’s relationship with women and a step towards redefining the project of citizenship, feminism, and gender justice. Feminists understood Law 58 as part of a wider effort to institute accountability and bring an end to the impunity that prevailed under the dictatorship by addressing the structural and mundane violence citizens encountered in their interactions with the state. The law also reconceptualized caring for women victims of violence as the legal responsibility of the state.
The text of the law itself designated gender as the basis for making claims to rights and encapsulated the idea of “special rights” and “positive discrimination” that have become means for reparation and redress as well as polemical topics of discussion in Tunisia and globally. Law 58 centered the figure of the victim as the subject of rights and posited vulnerability and violence as grounds for access to rights. Contestations over this law and its application clearly showed that certain forms of violence, such as bodily harm, rather than others, such as economic precarity, were more recognizable than others in liberal frameworks. But most importantly, the law stipulated the opening of shelters for battered women as a private-public enterprise, designating feminist activists as mediators in this endeavor. In the next section, I turn to a vignette from my ethnographic fieldwork between 2018 and 2019 during which I observed interactions among shelter residents, feminist activists, and shelter workers to unpack the process of the juridification of care.
The Legal Training Workshop at Al-Zohour
I met Mounira Ben Ahmed, a young feminist social worker, at a conference for women’s rights a few months into my fieldwork. Having undergone a training of trainers that was held by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), she qualified to lead legal workshops at shelters for victims of gender violence across the country as part of a joint program between Tunisia’s Ministry of Women and UN Women. The workshops, she said, are meant to introduce to care workers a new rights-based approach toward caring for victims. When I told her about my research and interest in observing those legal trainings, she gracefully agreed to allow me to accompany her. About a week later, Ben Ahmed called me to inform me that she will lead a workshop at Al-Zohour Shelter in the central province of Kairawan, and a few days later, I rode a louage (mini-bus) with her to a small town called Sbikha, where the Al-Zohour shelter was located. When we reached our destination, we found ourselves in front of a one-story white-washed building with tinted marine blue windows that had a ramp on one side and a flight of stairs on the other. The building lacked any sign indicating its character, which, I later learned, is to avoid the unwanted gaze of hostile neighbors, who ignorantly mistake it for a brothel.
Mejda, the shelter director, greeted us at the door and led us across a huge foyer and through a small corridor at the end of which was the room where the training was to be conducted. Mejda had taken up this position since the shelter opened its door in November 2017, three months after Law 58 was passed. Now six months later, the shelter had only three women, and they have had at most ten women, half of its capacity. It was approaching 9:30 a.m. when Mounira signaled that it was time to start, half an hour late. A group of nine workers from this shelter and a listening center in Kairawan’s town center gathered around a white table facing a white flip chart.
Mounira started by asking the participants to share their previous experience in care provision and then highlighted the importance of the training in helping them deal with the victims on a case-by-case basis since the difficulties they are facing may be vastly different. “We are not experts in psychology, but we have other skills that would enable us to recognize the needs of women. But we have to make sure we know how to protect ourselves first before we take care of the victims. In social work, we say that our goal is to help people help themselves,” she added. She further explained that she was “not here to lecture but to narrate her experience as much as to learn from theirs.”
Before she launched into the content of the training, she asked them to recount the challenges they faced in doing their work. Amina, a woman in her fifties who had been working with women victims of violence for over a decade, said she was glad that a law on the elimination of violence against women had been passed but expressed frustration that it had not been put into effect and that shelter workers did not have a “legal status” when they worked with women. “Those who wrote the law did not think of how to protect the workers who accompany women victims of violence,” she complained. Another participant lamented the lack of support from the state. Salma, a veiled woman in her late twenties, said she sometimes encountered women who want shelter workers to make decisions on their behalf. Mounira responded to her by saying, “We want to make sure that we do not promise her what we cannot provide or to trick her into having high expectations. When she leaves here, we have to make sure that she has all that she needs to be able to protect herself.”
After the initial discussion, Mounira started laying out the legislative and constitutional framework of care provision, providing an overview of Law 58 and the provisions in the country’s constitution that stipulate a prohibition of discrimination against women and the state’s responsibility in ensuring the provision of care for women victims of violence.
Mounira asked Karima, a woman in her mid-thirties, “How do you first receive women?” “If she’s on the phone asking for advice or help, I speak in a soft, slow, and warm manner. And when she comes into the shelter, I welcome her with a smile, listen to her, tell her what we can provide her and what we cannot. We always make sure not to make any decision on her behalf,” Karima responded. Mounira then said, “Exactly, always smile! These women are craving these smiles and these smiles encourage them to tell you their stories. It’s your duty to listen to them even if you have problems.” Then she stopped and looked around the room to signal that what she was about to say was important. “What does accompanying [women victims of violence] mean?” she asked rhetorically. “It means paying attention and taking each case seriously.” She then went on to unpack what “pay attention” and “taking each case seriously” meant. The keyword she emphasized was “professionalism.”
Within this vision, “professionalism” meant keeping written records of the victim’s history, day-to-day progress, and future plans. Mounira started by discussing with the participants how to conduct their day-to-day administrative tasks to facilitate monitoring, case follow-up, and communication with other organizations involved in care provision. “It should all be done in a professional way,” she elaborated. She asked them what they wrote on the information sheet, advising them to make sure they include information such as the victim’s age, whether she had children or not, the duration of the violence she experienced, and if she had any medical conditions among other things. She reminded them to ask for an emergency contact to figure out whether the victim had any family or not. “The preliminary report is very important. That’s what you will keep going back to. You have to write down what women want, expect, and need in your first encounter with them, whether on the phone or in person,” she said. “Any time after a month, you need to make an assessment of whether the woman is ready to leave. At this point, she will need to participate in an economic empowerment training. If you see that she is ready, you have to help her search for opportunities, look at job announcements in the newspapers, ask people you know, and contact the Social Affairs Ministry. Women can stay anywhere between a month and six months.”
In addition to carrying out administrative tasks, shelter workers need to embody a specific affective orientation toward the victim. “You need to nurture a kind and empathic relationship with the victims that involves both flexibility and professionalism,” she said. “This is not a friendship,” she added emphatically. “You are here to work and not make friends. Don’t let her think that you are doing her a favor. You have to place boundaries between yourself and these women. You have to be careful. Call them by their names, and not nicknames. So if her name is Souad, don’t call her Sousou!” At this point, the participants exploded in laughter. Through humor, Mounira sought to clarify the difference between a personal and a professional relationship.
In this scene, Mounira was providing her trainees guidance on how to navigate the challenge of care for battered women in a way that provides support to the women without giving victims a false impression of friendship. Central to that relationship is “professionalism” as an orientation and an ethic that ensures the provision of care without the risk of reinforcing the victims’ pattern of codependency. She then continued,
Don’t treat one woman better than the other. Treat them all the same. So, you can protect yourself and do not create problems amongst them. You have to realize that these women are very vulnerable. They do not have the mechanisms to protect themselves because of the psychological impact of violence. Because they have been dependent on their husbands, they have learned dependency. So, we want to make sure not to reinforce that [dependency] for the women. You have to have a professional relationship with these women, you have to be objective. Do not mix the professional with the personal so that the intervention will be effective. Showing empathy is ok, but it needs to be measured.
For Mounira, that care now is a legal category that is associated with state responsibility and that spawned an extensive network of care providers does not mean ridding it of sentiment but rather modulating caregivers’ affective expression of empathy in a way that is conducive to the ultimate goal of care provision in sowing a sense of autonomy and self-efficacy in the victims. The professional is impersonal, but the impersonal is not void of affect. Mounira clearly did not call for a complete rejection of affect in her push for professionalization, which necessarily entailed affective bonds that result from the proximity of caregiver and victim over a long period of time. On the other hand, there was unease with the outright expression of sentiment that threatened to embroil the victim in the same kind of toxic pattern of dependency that shaped her relationship with her abusive husband or kin. The “juridificaiton” of care provision through Law 58 involved the reconceptualization of social interactions as affectively impersonal in addition to the introduction of new administrative practices. To care for women victims of violence entailed standardizing administrative and bureaucratic procedures as well as fostering a specific kind of affective relationship with the victims that redefines these services and care provision as a right and not a favor. My observations at this shelter illustrated the complex ways in which documentation and affect, the professional and the personal, are interwoven in the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure of care.
Law And/Against Sentiment
The scenes I witnessed at the shelter illustrate the struggle of feminist activists to balance professionalism through bureaucratic care with the proper cultivation and expression of affect in dealing with women victims of violence. Professionalization in this context does not mean ridding one’s interactions of sentiment but rather recalibrating them to ensure that women victims of violence develop a sense of autonomy and self-efficacy so that they do not fall into the cycle of violence again. Depersonalized professionalism is not mutually exclusive with the display of appropriate and productive affect.
This configuration of law and violence in relation to gendered victimhood is generative of particular kinds of subjectivity and moral orientations that center autonomy and agency. Yet this victim-centered approach also displaces the burden of care, support, and “empowerment” on a gendered labor force in the absence of the requisite legal mechanisms that enable the application of the henceforth abstract and broad clause of law about care and protection. On the one hand, the juridification of care transformed it into an object of governance–solidified into reports, metrics, documents, and statistics. On the other hand, it revealed the emotional labor that is invisibilized by the seemingly standardized language of the law. Most of the care workers in the shelter and in the domain of care provision for victims of violence and even more broadly are women.
About the Author
Ola Galal is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Global Cultures at New York University’s Liberal Studies. An interdisciplinary writer, researcher, and educator, her work lies at the intersection of Political and Legal Anthropology, Gender Studies, Middle East and North African Studies, and multimodal storytelling. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and her M.A. in Anthropology/Sociology and B.A. in journalism from the American University in Cairo. As a publicly engaged scholar, her writing has appeared in academic journals as well as general media outlets including Political and Legal Anthropology Review, American Ethnologist, Mada Masr, and The Seattle Times among others.
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Citation: Ola Galal, The Juridification of Care and the Navigation of Sentiment in Post-Dictatorship Tunisia, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 26.08.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/61173
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (August 26, 2025). The Juridification of Care and the Navigation of Sentiment in Post-Dictatorship Tunisia. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved May 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14iab


