# Sexual harassment again!!



## MaidenScotland (Jun 6, 2009)

t is a sordid tale: A 16-year-old girl is groped while walking along the street. She responds by spitting in her attacker’s face, vowing to take back her rights. He, in turn, guns her down with an automatic weapon.

That is what is alleged to have happened to Eman Mostafa two weeks ago in a small village in Upper Egypt’s Assiut Governorate. While details of the incident have only slowly trickled out, the monstrosity of the alleged crime suggests a frightening increase in gendered violence following a spate of well-publicized cases of harassment and assault in recent months.

The suspect, Ramadan Nasser Salem, is now in police custody after having fled for more than a week. In an interview on Al-Hayat TV channel Saturday, he denied the version of events offered by witnesses.

“I was riding my motorbike and I saw her,” he said. “I said hello, and she thought I was harassing her and started cursing at me and spat in my face. I mistakenly fired my gun, and a passer-by told me the bullet hit a wall. We thought the girl was afraid and fell on the ground, but then people told us that the bullet hit her. I never meant to kill her.”

Salem’s denial notwithstanding, Dalia Abd El-Hameed, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, warns that the reported circumstances surrounding Mostafa’s death reflect a disturbing trend in sexual abuse against women.

“It’s becoming more violent, and this Assiut incident is a very vivid example of this,” she says. “He killed her. He killed her just because she defended herself. The mere fact was that she just didn’t accept what’s very accepted in society. When you don’t accept the norm, society punishes you. And he punished her.”

A 2010 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights found that 83 percent of Egyptian women have experienced harassment. In response, advocacy groups have pressed the government to tackle the issue.

Their efforts have produced an occasional glimmer of hope. In 2008, the government — for the first time — sentenced a man to three years in prison on a sexual harassment charge. In late 2010, 23 NGOs and human rights organizations teamed up in what was hailed as an unprecedented initiative to amend the Penal Code to more effectively address sexual harassment and assault, although their momentum was upended by the revolution.

And yet, by most accounts, the situation has only gotten worse. Some feel that in the past, perpetrators would flee the scene of the crime out of shame or fear of public backlash, but today’s perpetrators feel no such compunction.

Instead, silence by both the government and the public has enabled a much more virulent strain of abuse to take root.

“What is most disturbing and alarming is that there is a paradigm shift, and sexual harassment now tends more to be assault,” Abd El-Hameed says. “It’s more intrusive, it’s more bold, and I think this is the result of immunity and impunity that the perpetrators have from both the society and the police.”

More than that, she adds, police themselves have frequently been among the worst offenders.

The political and social instability of the last year and a half has also been an important factor, says Hoda Badran, chairwoman of the Alliance for Arab Women, as “women are more vulnerable than others to violence.”

Indeed, several high-profile sexual assaults have taken place at political rallies, most notably in Tahrir Square. But Badran argues that the situation is slowly improving as stability has gradually returned since the presidential election.

Activists working on the issue also point to small but substantive gains. The high-profile attacks in Cairo over the last few months helped spawn several grassroots initiatives aimed at bringing public awareness to the problem.

Their efforts were on display Sunday in a rally in front of the presidential palace co-organized by the social advocacy organization Basma and Nefsi, a Cairo-based anti-harassment group, to decry Mostafa’s death and demand a law specifically targeting sexual harassment and assault.

About two dozen protesters lined the sidewalk along the main boulevard at rush hour, holding signs bearing messages such as “I don’t want to be afraid when I walk in the streets,” and “Morsy, Morsy, where are you?” in reference to President Mohamed Morsy. Basma has also organized patrols in metro stations to identify sexual harassers and report them to police.

There is no shortage of idealism on the activists’ part.

At the rally Sunday, many passing motorists signaled their approval by giving protesters the thumbs up. Others were less impressed; several stopped to argue that women brought the problem onto themselves with their immodest dress.



Harassment of women may be getting more violent, but activists are fighting back | Egypt Independent


----------



## aykalam (Apr 12, 2010)

EGYPT’S HARSH REALITY

By Farah Halime, editor of Rebel Economy 

Two days ago I stared hard in the face of the consequences of the neglect and deprivation arising from nearly 60 years of autocratic rule in Egypt.

I was threatened by a group of men with a six-inch blade and had a lit cigarette thrown at me. It was because I’d splashed water in the face of a man who had been heckling me non-stop in traffic.

The men had been sitting in a minibus adjacent to me for 15 minutes, all the while taunting me with wagging tongues and juvenile chat-up lines.

In a flash of anger, and for the first time after living for a year in Cairo, I retaliated physically and splashed water in the face of the main assailant.

I had messed with the wrong men. Within seconds, the group jumped out of the minibus in the middle of traffic, surrounded the taxi I was in and tried opening the doors. My friend, who had been sitting next to me all along, reached over to lock my door.

The men looked at me, wild in their expression, and I looked back in anger. I tried to confront the men. It was then that I realised that my friend had been trying to stop me leaving, rather than the men entering the car.

Resigning themselves to the fact they couldn’t get in to my passenger seat, the main perpetrator threw his cigarette at me through the front door open window. I screamed in anger and he screamed back.

He then showed me his shiny blade in full view of the tens of other cars surrounding us, and I shut up.

I don’t blame these men for their behaviour. I blame the Egyptian government and its neglect. 

These men are the reason why deaths occur at protests, the reason crime in slums is incessant, the reason why some women can’t leave their house anymore for fear of attacks or sexual harassment.

They are uneducated and have no access to education. They are poor and never have had the opportunity to develop a career and earn their own money. They are ignorant, in part, because the government is ignorant of them.

A senior banker at a big bank in Egypt once said to me: “You know Farah, I hate all this scum, these dirty people in Egypt. That’s why we have all these problems”.

No, it’s not. It’s people like him that are too scared to admit that they are benefiting unfairly while millions live in squalor. I understand why these men lost their temper at me, a middle-class girl sitting in an air-conditioned taxi humiliating them with an act of defiance.

Egypt must take heed of these disgusting actions and realise the fundamental problem of the state: a lack of health, education and access to general welfare has distorted society. This is the reason why Hosni Mubarak should be serving a life sentence in prison, not just his role in killing protesters last year.

It is President Morsi’s main priority to provide the possibility of a better way of life. Forget Islamic finance, loans and grants and public private partnerships.

Egypt has to restructure its ideals and reflect that in its budget and policy-making. Subsidies are not a cure-all, but health and education are. So why does Egypt spend more on ludicrous energy subsidies than health and education combined?

The incident has made me more aware of the consequences of my knee-jerk reaction. Though I am unlikely to react the same way again, I do not regret what I did. Even so, do not be angry but feel pity, because these men are among many that have been abandoned by the state.

Egypt’s Harsh Reality « REBEL ECONOMY


----------

