Samira Bellil

Samira Bellil (24 November 1972 – 4 September 2004) was a French feminist activist and a campaigner for the rights of girls and women.

The book discusses the violence she and other young women endured in the predominantly North African and Arab immigrant outskirts of Paris, where she was repeatedly gang-raped as a teenager by gangs led by people she knew, and then abandoned by her family and friends.

Her father was jailed almost immediately for murder and she was fostered by a family in Belgium for five years, before being called back to her parents.

[2] As a teenager Bellil rebelled against the traditional constraints of her community and wanted to live freely as a young French woman.

[2] Bellil's parents, who believed themselves shamed by her presence, expelled her from her house as she did not practice 'modesty' and chose not to veil herself with a hijab.

She had years of therapy, and describes how she decided to write her book to show other young women gang-rape victims that there was a way out.