Samira Bellil

Samira Bellil (November 24, 1972 – September 7, 2004) was a French campaigner for the rights of Muslim girls and women.

Samira became famous in France with the publication of her autobiographical book Dans l'enfer des tournantes (Ed. Denoel, 9 October 2002). She described the violence she endured in a Muslim immigrant suburb of Paris, where she was gang-raped twice when she was a teenager by her boyfriend and a group of his friends, and then rejected by her family and friends. Her book put the light on the difficulties girls face in the heavily immigrant French cité.

She died on 7 September 2004 of stomach cancer in Paris. She was 31.