Algeria:Where breast cancer survivors are shunned as "half women"

As if losing a breast to cancer was not traumatic enough, Algerian mother-of-three Linda was then spurned by her husband for being “mutilated” and a “half-woman”.

“Cancer? It’s nothing compared with being rejected after 18 years of marriage,” the 50-year-old medical assistant said, still clearly upset years later.

Linda is one of hundreds of Algerian women to have been abandoned by their husbands or fiances after being diagnosed with breast cancer, a charity says.

Thousands of women are found to suffer from the disease every year in Algeria, leaving many with no option but to surgically remove a part of their body deeply associated with their feminity.

Hayat says her fiance dumped her after she told him she had an emergency operation to remove a breast.

“He told me: ‘I want a whole woman, not three-quarters of one’,” the 30-year-old student said, bursting into tears.

Samia Gasmi, the head of a cancer charity, says many women are dropped by their husbands just after they are diagnosed, leaving them alone to face drastic treatment - and sometimes even without a roof over their heads.

“Some sink into depression,” said the head of Nur Doha, which means “Light of Day” in Arabic.

“Others end up in shelters because they have nowhere else to go once their husbands abandon them.”

In a country where breast cancer is viewed as a private matter, patients are often reluctant to speak up - even sometimes hiding it from their own family. “These women view their illness as shameful,” Gasmi said. 

One woman refused to tell her own sister, she said, while another started wearing the Islamic scarf before chemotherapy so her husband’s family would have no idea when her hair started falling out.

One patient “chose to die with her two breasts rather than accept any removal”.

All women interviewed by AFP refused to appear in front of a camera and refused to give their second names.

Sociologist Yamina Rahou says this feeling of shame comes from the “pain of having a body part that symbolises feminity amputated”.

Patients who have had a breast removed feel they no longer fulfil the role society demands of a woman, the researcher at the Social and Cultural Anthropology Research Centre in Oran said.

Theologian Kamel Chekkat, of the Algerian Clerics Association, insisted men rejecting their wives after they have a breast removed is un-Islamic.

“It has nothing to do with religion, it’s education,” he said.

Between 9,000 and 10,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed a year in Algeria, according to Farid Cherbal, a professor and expert in cancer genetics at the University of Algiers.