SAINT-DENIS, France -- Fifteen-year-old Rawa risks verbal abuse _ or worse _ every time she leaves her house wearing jeans. Jenah was thrown out of the family home at 11, became a drug dealer at 13, and was raped by a relative a year later.
If young men in France's poor housing projects _ scenes of three weeks of nightly arson and unrest _ have it rough, girls often have it worse. Not only do they suffer from racism, unemployment and deprivation: They also endure daily harassment and even violence in their own communities.
"Women are double victims, of social and sexual discrimination as well as violence," said Fadela Amara, founder of "Ni Putes, Ni Soumises" (Neither a Whore nor a Submissive), a group fighting to improve the lot of Muslim women and girls in impoverished French neighborhoods.
The plight of girls and women in the high-rise housing projects indicates that while racial discrimination may keep immigrants and their offspring on the margins of French society, that may not be the whole picture.
Some people in France's mostly Muslim North and Sub-Saharan African immigrant communities have resisted accepting Western values and the French way of life _ making it harder for them to thrive. Polygamous households, while uncommon, can also be a barrier to integration.
Often from conservative backgrounds, many parents find it hard to shake off taboos. They expect their French-born daughters to remain virgins until marriage and refuse to allow them to marry non-Muslims.
And girls are often forced into marriages they do not want, said Amara.
"There's an identity crisis here," said Sonia Imloul, who works with troubled teens in Seine-Saint-Denis, a district northeast of Paris where the rioting _ now abated _ erupted Oct. 27. "It is very tough when you are stuck midway between France and Algeria or Morocco."
Some activists say the influence of radical Islamic preachers is partly to blame for how men treat women.
An Algerian Muslim prayer leader, Abdelkader Bouziane, was convicted last year in the southeastern city of Lyon and handed a six-year suspended sentence for publicly justifying beating an adulterous wife. He was deported to Algeria in October 2004.
Physical violence _ including gang rapes _ has been widely reported against girls and young women of North African origin.
Amara notes a pattern of unemployed immigrant fathers losing authority to sons who bring in money by dealing drugs, stealing or who have adopted radical Islam. Girls in such families are often exposed to violence and exploitation or to religious repression, she said.
