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Uzbekistan: Court jails pair for propagating gender discrimination [1]
['Ayzirek Imanaliyeva', 'China-Central Asia Monitor']
Date: 2024-02
A court in Uzbekistan has sentenced two people to 15 days in jail for producing a video for social media that appeared to justify violence against women.
The Shayxontoxur district court in the capital, Tashkent, found in its January 27 ruling that the pair, identified only by the initials Sh.O and R.A., had produced and disseminated material promoting violence, cruelty and gender discrimination.
The offending one-minute video, which was uploaded to social media platforms earlier this month, opens with the scene of a husband punching his wife. When the woman goes to seek refuge with her parents, she initially receives a sympathetic hearing. But upon reflection, the father worries that his daughter will struggle to find another suitable partner if she leaves her husband. He concludes accordingly that the woman provoked the argument and that she should return to her husband.
Publication of the video sparked widespread condemnation. The clamor was so great that its producers were compelled to issue an apology.
“We posted a video on our social media that suggested that a woman must unconditionally obey her husband. [But] the situation depicted in the video contradicts Uzbekistan's laws on gender equality,” they are reported as having said by news website Kun.uz.
The authorities in Uzbekistan have been eager to be seen as taking a firm stand against gender-based violence.
Last April, parliament adopted legislation aimed at providing women and children with greater legal protections from physical abuse. The long-anticipated legislation, which was promptly signed by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, was the first of its kind in Uzbekistan to so specifically target domestic violence.
Under that law, fines or prison time are envisioned for people found guilty of assaulting a current or former spouse, a cohabitant, or the parent of a shared child. Another provision bars individuals with a criminal record for sexually abusing a minor from holding jobs involving contact with children.
Women in Uzbekistan are often targeted with other, equally insidious, forms of gendered abuse, however.
Last May, police announced that they had arrested a group of people on suspicion of running a Telegram channel that published nude photographs of women as part of a blackmail campaign. The public Telegram channel created by the suspects was titled “Hello Tashkent, Salam Tashkent” and featured intimate images and videos of women. Victims of this invasion of privacy were invited to pay money to have the images removed.
And the theme of violence against women is still often played off as a joke.
In another episode from earlier this month, an online household appliances store released an advertisement showing a shopper punching his female companion in the face and then subsequently appearing to have placed her body in a freezer.
News website Fergana, which reported on this advertisement, noted that while the company that produced it had pulled the video, the footage is still freely circulating online.
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