New report exposes obstacles to women’s sport

The al-Jazeera panel presents their review of female sport in Yemen.

In its inaugural report al-Jazeera Center for Human Rights Studies (CHRS) has dedicated a chapter to Yemeni woman involved in sports. The report reviewed Yemeni women’s sporting history during 2006 to 2007. Women’s participation in sports was officially inaugurated in 1999 by establishing a General Woman Administration at the Ministry of Sports and Youth. It was followed by the formation of the Woman Committee at the Olympic Committee in the same year. The General Woman’s Sports Association was established in May 25, 2005 as a joint collaboration between the Ministry of Youth and Sports and the Olympic Committee.

Since then, women’s involvement in sports has confronted several obstacles ranging from social, physical, personal and religious hindrances. The report criticized the last factor: when fanatic religious clerics consider women’s involvement in sports to be against Islam. 

The CHRS report sees the last factor as an attempt to defame women’s participation in sports despite the fact that this does contradict either Islam or Yemeni traditions. It points out the impacts of such religious attitudes, which create the public impression that women’s participation in sports contradicts Islam.

The report stressed that these types of fanatical religious addresses have to disappear and let new ideas emerge and challenge them. However, they put a number of restrictions, demanding that there should not be co-sport activities engaging women and men and the sport should be only for woman fitness, not engaging women and men in one game. It also stipulated that women should abide by chastity, Islamic uniform, and suitable sports.  

The report also reviewed the community’s participation in defaming women who play sports, attributing this view to traditional unfounded concepts due to the spread of incorrect notions about sports being harmful to woman’s health.
The physical hindrances, which the report divides into four sections, are considered to be the major obstacle to women’s involvement in sports. The report classified physical factors which are realized in the budget, incentives, sport establishments, and sport uniforms, blaming the incompatibility of the apportioned sport budget for women and the lack of incentives and sport clothes at the beginning of the sport seasons.

The fifth obstructing factor is the lack of qualified women in sports, educational fields and girls’ schools. The report recommended that the social contents of education should be reconsidered in order to develop humanitarian values and create respectable relations between males and females, proposing the reassessment of the school curriculum, activation of physical education periods and implementation of compulsory physical exercise.

The report called for providing women with sport uniforms at the beginning of each sport season in addition to the spread of awareness messages related to sports, which should be done in collaboration with the Ministry of Information.

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