Jean-Luc Boujon / Photo credits: Aline Morcillo / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP 10:47 a.m., April 5, 2024

Three days after the attack on Samara in Montpellier, the question of religious pressure at school arises. The 14-year-old girl had been harassed for several months by one of her classmates, who notably treated her as an unbeliever. In Vaulx-en-Velin, near Lyon, some students confide to Europe 1 that this pressure is also felt.

The attack on Samara, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, shocks France. The young girl was attacked when leaving her Montpellier establishment at the beginning of the week. The attack was allegedly orchestrated by one of her classmates, who has been harassing the teenager for several months, not hesitating to insult her as a bitch and a kouffar (disbeliever in Arabic, editor's note). “Samara dresses in the West,” the victim’s mother told journalists, before adding that the suspect “wears the veil.” 

A school harassment therefore, but also a religious one that some women denounce. In Vaulx-en-Velin, near Lyon, Sara, 15, attends the Alfred de Musset high school. And to go there every day, she wants to look great: tight jeans, a tight little top, without forgetting the makeup, quite heavy, foundation and mascara... Which doesn't please some friends her age.

“You have to be discreet.”

"When they see a girl wearing a lot of makeup, wearing very short clothes, they're going to say that if you're a Muslim, you don't have the right to do that, you don't have the right to dress like that , you're not allowed to wear makeup like that, you have to be discreet," she explains on Europe 1. 

“Religion does not tolerate this.” This is also the argument used to criticize Jana, a 20-year-old student, for her leggings, jacket and painted nails outfit. "There are many young girls of the same age as me who will tend, to get us back on the right path, to tell us that it is better to dress like this or like that... To be more covered, less put on makeup, don't pluck my eyebrows. And it's true that leggings could potentially be displeasing too. Because they're tight and you can see women's shapes," she says. 

But these young girls have chosen not to give in to this pressure which is sometimes exerted even within the family and also on social networks where a very rigorous conception of Islam tends to develop and influence society.