At the touch of a button on your smartphone, you can save yourself, your family member, a friend or any other person from danger and violent attacks.
Thanks to the “TOOQ” application, which was initiated by Dr Hind bin Ammar Tarawneh, who is the wife of Jordan’s ambassador to Tunisia Maher Salem Tarawneh, it is now possible for the girl, woman or her child, who are the most vulnerable groups to violence, to ask for help when they are victims of an assault or violence.
The e-application aims to protect women and the family from violence, said Tarawneh, who presented the details of its creation and its purpose on Wednesday afternoon in the capital Tunis, in the presence of ambassadors’ wives and representatives of civil society organisations and the media.
Tarawneh, who is the Deputy Executive Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation in charge of international cooperation programmes, explained that the idea of creating this application emerged with the period of the Corona pandemic, indicating that it is an easy-to-use application that can be downloaded on different smartphones.
Tarawneh said the application, which was designed by a group of young Tunisians and was officially launched on November 25, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, has been successful in Morocco, Algeria and Libya with hundreds of followers, and today it is presented as a gift to social partners in Tunisia, pending its presentation for the benefit of all Arab women.
For her part, Fatima Bouzakaya, representative of the start-up that designed this application, explained that the phenomenon of violence in Tunisia has increased by 63% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to the report of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, adding that domestic violence against women represents 38.7%.
She also said that what encouraged the company to design this application is the large percentage of Tunisians who use smartphones, as the National Institute of Statistics indicates that the percentage of Internet use in Tunisia is 74 %, while the number of smartphones in Tunisia is around 7.4 million phones. 64 % of Tunisians own a smartphone.
The number of followers of the application on its Facebook page has reached two thousand five hundred followers, with Algeria topping the list with 38.4 % of followers, then Libya with 15.9 % and Tunisia with 14.8 %. The majority of followers are between 18 and 24 years old and between 25 and 34 years old. The percentage of women who follow the page is 41.9% and 58.1% of men. The number of Facebook users who have visited the page has reached 42,061.
Pending its dissemination in the rest of the Arab countries, the initiators of this application are relying on Tunisian civil society to engage in the promotion of this application and support its use, which would help reduce the phenomenon of violence against women in particular and violence within society in general.
TunisianMonitorOnline (by Douha Saafi, translated by NejiMed)
