PARIS, Feb 2: In spite of sub-zero temperatures, sleet and snow, thousands of Muslim women turned up on Saturday for the first day of a five-week march that will take them to 23 cities of France, and allow them to protest the growing violence to which they are subject in the country’s urban neighbourhoods.

Symbolically, the march began in the city of Vitry-sur-Seine, where a young Muslim woman, Sohanne Denziane, was burned alive last October when she refused the advances of a group of young men who had been regularly raping and harassing the young women of this large Islamic community located in the southeastern suburb of Paris.

Sponsored by such organizations as SOS-Racisme, and the Federation des Maisons des Potes, the association which is spearheading the current series of marches, the Marche des Femmes will make its way eventually to such cities as Rennes, Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseilles, Lyons, Strasbourg and Lille, and return to Paris for March 8, International women’s day.

The principal slogan being chanted by the marchers will be “Ni Putes Ni Soumises,” which indicates, in the words of Fadela Amara, president of the Federation des Maisons des Potes, “that we’re neither loose women nor submissive women, contrary to what is often expected of us by the young men of the country’s urban centres.”

“Indeed,” she adds, “we made a purposeful choice of words in coming up with that slogan, for our main goal is to provoke a debate because the women are largely viewed by the local men as being nothing less than streetwalkers.”