thumb|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.
Bellil became famous in France with the publication of her autobiographical book Dans l'enfer des tournantes ('In the hell of the "tournantes" (gang-rapes) in 2002. 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.
The book is available in English (translated by Lucy R. McNair) as To Hell and Back: The Life of Samira Bellil.
Life
Bellil was born to Algerian parents in Algiers. Her family migrated to France and settled in the Parisian suburb of Val-d'Oise. 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. "People outside the community don't know," Bellil wrote, "and everyone in the community knows, but they won't say anything."
Eventually, she found a psychologist who helped her. 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. "It's long and it's difficult, but it's possible," she wrote in the dedication - to "my sisters in trouble". She used her real name and put her photo on the cover. She dedicated the book to her "girlfriends, so that they realize that one can overcome the traumatic" and to Boris Cyrulnik, her therapist. Her experience shocked France and forced the government to look into the issue.
She became a youth worker. She died aged 31 on 4 September 2004 of stomach cancer.