Egypt’s sexual harassment of women an ‘epidemic’
You can’t tell who’s trying to rape you and who’s trying to save you. That for me is the most horrific thing about the mob attacks on women that have come to characterise protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square.
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Janet Abdel Aleem, one of the few women willing to speak openly about her experience, told me how she was assaulted last November.
The square was full of people protesting then President Morsi’s decree giving himself almost dictatorial powers.
Suddenly a man was forcing his hands inside her pants, and within seconds more than a dozen leapt in saying they were trying to rescue her.
“They were putting their hands into my blouse, touching here and there,” she recalled.
“All of them were saying the same thing: we will apologise to you, we will give him a good beating. It seems that they knew each other.”
Janet works for an activist group trying to protect women from such harassment – she was in the square with colleagues handing out flyers, on the lookout for vulnerable women when she herself was attacked.
During attacks, mobs of thirty or more men form a circle around a woman and assault her with their hands or even sharp objects.
It might seem best to send only men to protect women but that doesn’t work if rapists and harassers are posing as saviours.
“We realized last week that victims find it difficult to trust anyone,” said Zeinab Sabet of Tahrir Bodyguard, another group that patrols the square to protect women.
“People say ‘she’s my wife, I’m going to help her.’ My colleague said in one incident last week, five men were in the circle saying ‘she’s my wife’.”
Until now Tahrir Bodyguard female volunteers have been confined to caring for victims in a safe house after rescue. Now they plan to send one woman with each team so the victims can distinguish rescuers from rapists.
More than a hundred women, amongst them two young foreign female journalists, are reported to have been raped or harassed during protests last week which brought down the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohammed Morsi.
The Brotherhood publicised a video showing a mob attack in Tahrir Square, the aim being to blame their opponents for violence against women.
Morsi’s supporters, now on the streets, told me today that there was no danger for women amongst their crowds.
Activists say this is far from the truth. In power, the Brotherhood blocked a law with harsh penalties for violence against women, and men of all political persuasions have been involved in assaults.
(women protesters in Tahrir Square)
The aim is to intimidate women off the streets, and some parties are reported to have paid mobs to attack.
Beyond the politics lie complex social and religious problems. Janet Abdel Aleem’s group, Fouada, has interviewed Egyptian boys aged 8 – 12 to hear their views on sexual assault. The answers are revealing.
“If a lady is respectable nobody will harass her,” says one kid. “A lady who wears trousers in the street is not respectable.”
“Some young ladies who walk on the street, when we flirt with them, they smile at us,” says another.
Sexual harassment has been endemic in Egypt for years. The mob attacks have erupted since the revolution. Neither will end until social attitudes to women change.
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