The controversial Egyptian film entitled 678, the number of a bus, in which three women are persistently subjected to sexual harassment during their daily journey to work brought this phenomenon to public attention when the film was released in 2010, nevertheless it is as revelavnt today as it was then. The women fret as the attacks become more frequent, and they decide to do something about it since the law in Egypt does not clearly define sexual harassment. Indeed, there have been numerous cases in which women who report an incident to the police end up being the victims of sexual harassment in the police station itself. The film was awarded top prize at the 2010 Dubai International Film Festival amid much international acclaim. Nevertheless, not everyone welcomed the film, and there was some hostility from certain quarters. Do women have the right to physically harm men who sexually harass them? Mahmoud Hanafy Mahmoud of the Association for Human Rights and Social Justice, an NGO, objected to the film and requested that it be banned because of a contentious scene in which one of the women attacks her harasser, potentially inciting women to cause injury to men using blades and other sharp instruments.
However, director Mohamed Diab and other Arab filmmakers argued that the film did not incite violence, but rather documented the increasingly widespread practice of urban Egyptian women carrying weapons in the public arena in order to ensure their self-defence. A recently released Thomson Reuters Foundation report placed Egypt as the worst country in the Arab world for women in terms of sexual harassment. Further reports have confirmed the prevalence of the phenomena, so much so that it has become something of a national scandal. A United Nations report on women in April 2013 concluded that 99.3 per cent of women and girls were sexually harassed in Egypt, for example, more than in any other Arab country. Whether this is because more Egyptian women report such cases is unclear. Thomson Reuters surveyed 336 gender experts last August and September to make the report and noted that an unacceptably high number of Egyptian women were subjected to sexual harassment. Yet, activists insist that the authorities have not looked seriously into the different facets of this social phenomenon, preferring to relegate this to sometime in the future, if ever. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, a UN body concerned with gender matters, has also published a report showing the most recent statistics for sexual harassment in Egypt. The study also shows that the vast majority of Egyptian women have experienced some form of sexual harassment. Activists complain that some Egyptians, especially men, may even have become “desensitised” to the issue. Even though studies reveal that sexual harassment is rife in rural Egypt, the fight against the phenomenon has thus far been an exclusively urban one, partly due to the greater potential for close interaction between men and women in public spaces such as on public transport and in bustling markets. “There is a misconception that sexual harassment is about physical attraction and sexual gratification. On the contrary, sexual harassment is primarily an act of violence or verbal abuse that stems from the frustration of unemployed young males who feel empowered by sexually harassing women. This is not to presume that sexual harassment does not exist exclusively in the poorer shantytowns of Cairo, and other large urban centres of the country. Downtown and Tahrir Square or other venues where demonstrators traditionally congregate have become notorious for the most publicised incidents of sexual harassment, but this is a phenomenon that knows no class boundaries or spatial constrictions. Nor is it confined to the workplace or the streets, and it is not uncommon in the domestic arena,” Aida Seif Al-Dawla, a psychiatrist and human rights activist, told Al-Ahram Weekly. The past two years have witnessed much social upheaval, economic malaise and political instability and even lawlessness in certain parts of the country. And it is against this grim backdrop that two volunteer rescue groups, Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment and Tahrir Bodyguard, were set up in Tahrir Square in the aftermath of the 30 June Revolution to help deal with the problem. The two organisations employ slightly different tactics, but both battle against harassers. They deploy both men and women trained in the martial arts and often use clubs and other weapons to discourage attackers. The injured victims are promptly dispatched to hospital. The volunteers even help to re-clothe undressed women and whisk them off to safe houses in the vicinity of Tahrir. There have been instances of gangs of offenders attempting to break into the safe houses, while some of the rescuers have also been assaulted and verbally abused. According to the UN study, 96.5 per cent of the women in the survey said that sexual harassment had come in the form of indecent touching, the most common manifestation of sexual harassment. Verbal sexual harassment saw the second-highest rate, with 95.5 per cent of women reporting cases. The report noted that 83 per cent of Egyptian women admitted to experiencing some form of sexual harassment. It indicated that 46 per cent of these experienced sexual harassment on a daily basis. Over the years, sexual harassment incidents have tended to increase. According to HarassMap, a volunteer-based independent initiative with the mission to end the social acceptability of sexual harassment and assault in Egypt, the incidence of sexual harassment especially increased during and in the aftermath of the 25 January Revolution. “This is not a new phenomenon: women have suffered for a long time from sexual harassment, but more women are now reporting cases to both the police and the non-governmental organisations concerned with this particular problem. The first major protest against sexual harassment was in June 2005, and I participated in it,” Magda Adli, director of the Al-Nadim Centre for the Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, told the Weekly.
Al-Nadim provides psychological management and rehabilitation to victims of torture and harassment. Together with other NGOs and individuals, it also provides forms of social support and refers victims to legal resources. “We increasingly have women coming to our Centre to report and complain about sexual harassment. We conduct research, and I personally have reviewed many cases. I worked in Saudi Arabia and noted that many Saudi women suffered from similar conditions to those we have in Egypt. In Saudi Arabia, the victim is sometimes even murdered by male members of her family, something that is also seen in rural Upper Egypt. The difference is that in Saudi Arabia the mother of the victim is also murdered on the pretext that she was not a good mother. The point is that social conditioning and cultural mores dictate that women are blamed for being harassed,” Adli told the Weekly. “I have read the Reuters report, and I am not sure how it came to the conclusion that Egypt was the worst sexual harassment offender in the Arab world. Nevertheless, sexual harassment is a serious problem in Egypt,” she added. Adli said that sexual harassment was not restricted to a particular class or region, even though the worst cases she had examined were in remote areas such as Upper Egypt. Nevertheless, sexual harassment is also becoming more common in urban centres, both in the upmarket sections of cities as well as in the informal areas. “Sexual harassment cuts across class and social backgrounds. It is most prevalent within the domestic domain. Most cases of sexual harassment occur within the family. Society is conditioned to regard it as a man's right to demand sexual gratification from his wife whether or not she feels up to it, and religion sanctions this particular conjugal duty,” Adli maintained.
She noted that the study also broke down sexual harassment by the various regions of the country, time of day and the occupations of the harassers. “I am concerned because now even some young boys, or adolescents, think of sexual harassment as a game of sorts. Teenage boys sometimes sexually harass girls,” she added. “Even more serious is the fact that some high-profile women, such as Azza Al-Gharr, popularly known as Om Ayman, have condemned girls for ‘attracting men', saying that the girls ‘deserved to be punished' for wearing indecent clothes,” Adli observed. Om Ayman is a former MP and a member of the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood. Her position on the subject indicates that even some women blame the victim. “Women politicians have not taken this social ill seriously. There has been a general lack of interest in the subject,” Adli concluded. Walid Hammad, a young Egyptian actor, decided to try to experience firsthand what women are subjected to on the streets of Cairo. He dressed as a woman and paraded the city streets, twice, first dressed as an unveiled woman and then as a veiled woman in a hijab. On both occasions, the language used by the men he encountered was atrocious. The irony was that the verbal abuse and sexual harassment he faced as a veiled woman was far worse than that he encountered when he walked the streets without the hijab.
“The language of men of all ages was invariably insulting, but even when flirtatious philanders used less abusive terms, their expressions were condescending,” Hammad said. HarassMap has done a great deal of work to highlight the crisis, and it has published a study similar to the Thomson Reuters report. This indicates that 69 per cent of harassment incidents happen on the street, 49.1 per cent on public transportation, 42.4 per cent in parks and coffee shops, 29 per cent in educational institutions, 19.8 per cent on beaches, and 6.2 per cent in the workplace. Some 63 per cent of the reports of sexual harassment submitted to HarassMap noted that at least 45 per cent of the harassers were identified in the reports as men. Yet, curiously enough 2.5 per cent of the reports were also submitted by men who said they had been harassed by either other men or women. “Sexual harassment is not committed by a certain type or group of people. Harassers include all parts of Egyptian society and all ages. Our reports have documented harassment from managers and supervisors, teachers and professors, police officers, soldiers, security men at banks and hotels, builders, taxi or bus drivers, guys driving fancy cars, doctors, salesmen, restaurant staff, peddlers, and even young children,” the HarassMap report concludes. Egypt's National Council for Women is now working with the interior ministry to set up a system whereby women can report sexual harassment cases to a specialised team of female police officers in conjunction with centres such as Al-Nadim. There is now more coverage in the media about the crisis, and more women are encouraged to relate their experiences. I was at first concerned about writing on this subject, but Adli said that she would rather a man write on it because unfortunately women in Egypt are still “not always taken seriously”. “This is a social problem,” she said. “It is not just a women's problem. Historically, men in Egypt have been among the most vociferous defenders of women's rights, men like [the early 20th-century reformer] Qassim Amin and [19th-century nationalist] Ahmed Orabi, for example,” she explained. Fortunately, efforts to raise awareness of the problem are intensifying. The Al-Nadim Centre, in particular, founded in 1993, “has devoted itself to the struggle against this crime, and we realise that over the past few years the situation has deteriorated,” Adli added. “The state of lawlessness in much of the country has contributed to the crisis. In the aftermath of the Tahrir Square demonstrations, organised sexual harassment gangs were organised to intimidate female political activists.” Adli added that during the first year of its work, Al-Nadim had restricted its activities to the provision of psychological rehabilitation to victims of torture and the provision of medico-legal reports whenever this was necessary.
“At that time, we were working with other human rights organisations and found great difficulty in getting reports for victims of torture from official medical institutions, such as university or government hospitals.” Later, the Centre also started to work on cases of harassment. The fight against sexual harassment and to bring the offenders to book is not only restricted to Egypt. Al-Nadim has helped set up a Sudanese Group against Torture, now extended to sexual harassment, making this a regional struggle. “We are working closely with like-minded organisations in both Africa and the Arab world,” Adli said.
