Soon after Egyptian courts handed their first ever prison sentence in a sexual harassment case, Amira El-Noshokaty describes a growing social ill and talks to the people who try to defy it Setting her apart from thousands of women whose stories have gone untold, 27-year-old film director Noha Roushdi made headlines when she insisted on bringing the man who sexually harassed her on the street to justice in court. One afternoon last June, Roushdi was walking down the street accompanied by a friend in the up-market Heliopolis district of Cairo, when suddenly she was attacked by a mini-truck driver who reached out and grabbed her breast. As she later on recounted on numerous television programmes, she dropped her bag and ran after her harasser, yelling out at him in the middle of the street. She received no support at this stage from anyone, except for a young man who came to help her and her friend. In fact, Roushdi sought the assistance of staff at a nearby police office, yet none was forthcoming to begin with. Eventually, and by force of principle, the young man managed to help her and her friend almost literally drag the sex offender to the police station, where they reported the incident. After several months of waiting, and bringing Roushdi's story into the limelight, last week Cairo's Criminal Court issued its verdict -- indeed the first of its kind -- and sentenced the sexual offender to three years in prison for indecent assault. This comes as a message of hope and victory for all Egyptian women, who today suffer sexual harassment in all its forms. "I am so proud of Noha," said Mariam Mekkawi, a college student and herself a victim of harassment. However, Mekkawi does not place a great deal of hope in the verdict itself, as she considers it to be little more than a short-term solution. "Until a new generation is brought up believing that sexual harassment is a crime," nothing will change, she believes. However she concedes that if every victim does the same as Roushdi, then harassers will become scared, and will refrain from behaving that way. Given the lack of precedents, the case was not easy to fight. Roushdi's legal representative lawyer Ziad El-Elimi explained to Al-Ahram Weekly how the case was won. "Legally speaking there is no article penalising sexual harassment per se, however it falls under the article of indecent assault that defines any touching of private body parts as incriminating," he said. With no precedent, El-Elimi felt the need to get creative. Indeed, the sentence was handed down after he used three story- boards to illustrate a number of scenarios -- admittedly a rather unusual technique -- as part of his defence strategy. The first story- board illustrated the harasser's version, which was that he had touched Roushdi by accident. However, the story-board proved that this version had to be false, given the reality of the length of the human arm. Then the second story-board proved the harasser's statement to be a lie, since he contradicted his own words when he first explained that he put his hands out to warn her away from getting injured by the goods he was carrying on the back of his truck. This version was also proven wrong, in that it was contradictory with another statement in which the harasser was allegedly on his way to pick up computer-ware -- and was therefore travelling with no truckload at all. Finally the third illustration portrayed Roushdi's version, in other words, what really happened. This demonstration, juxtaposed with the police investigation, was central to the final verdict. Meanwhile, "though we asked for a public trial, so we could make an example out of the harasser, the judge insisted it be a private hearing," lamented El-Elimi. Sadly, sexual harassment is anything but new to Egyptian society. From the story of the girl who fell victim to harassment by numerous males in the lower-middle-class district of Attaba in the early 1990s, to accounts of group harassers who randomly attacked several girls in Mohandessin last Eid, and on to the chilling story of Roushdi, incident after incident proves that the phenomenon is savagely on the rise while bystanders barely do anything at best -- or join in at worst. Now viewed as a hero, Roushdi is among the very few women who have broken the veil of silence that sexual harassment enjoys. For the most part, however, it is generally understood that being a victim of harassment brings disgrace to the family, since the female takes the blame most of the time. Things may be changing, however. It is an encouraging sign that Al-Azhar has issued a condemnation of sexual harassment, described it as a crime that should be addressed and pleaded to the community not to withhold any information. While Al-Azhar's statement emphasised that women have right to safety on the streets, it also asked women to dress modestly to avoid being harassed, and told men not to look. Definitions of the term "sexual harassment" may vary from one person to another and even from men to women. But on the whole it is accepted as meaning unwelcome sexual attention. It includes a range of behaviours from seemingly mild transgressions and annoyances to actual sexual abuse or assault. Despite it being a constant threat to 83 per cent of Egyptian women and 98 per cent of foreign women living in Egypt, according to a June 2008 study titled Clouds in Egypt's Sky conducted by the Egyptian Centre For Women's Rights (ECWR), sexual harassment continues to be perceived as a private issue that is for the most part silenced to avoid shame for women victims. The study, which counted on the participation of 2020 Egyptians from both sexes as well as foreign women resident in Egypt, shockingly revealed that 46 per cent of Egyptian adult women are sexually harassed on a daily basis. College student Mekkawi recounts the harassment she has faced. Last September, a day before the start of the holy month of Ramadan, she stood paused only a few metres away from her family, who were hailing a taxi in Talaat Harb Square in Downtown Cairo, at 11am on a Friday morning. Despite being dressed in full-length trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, she was suddenly groped by a man who put out his arm to grab her breast. "I screamed, he ran, and I ran after him, asking people on the street to stop him. When I realised that some of the people I was calling for help were in fact plainclothes police detectives, I asked them to take him to the nearest police station. But they refused and asked me to forgive him," distressed Mekkawi told the Weekly. Most shocking of all was the behaviour of a veiled old woman who happened to be passing by and denied the whole incident, and had the audacity to accuse Mekkawi's mother of not teaching her daughter good manners. In spite of the obstacles she faced, Mekkawi insisted on reporting her harasser, and after threatening to complain to the police detectives' superiors, they became cooperative and escorted the victim and the harasser. "Despite being harassed frequently on the street, this time was different. I was shaking and crying because I was really offended by the woman, who was probably subjected to the same harassment and yet didn't stand by me," the young student said. "Even when I asked the old woman to accompany me and testify against the harasser at the police station, she refused. But I took a real stand this time, unlike other times, when I neither had a witness nor was I able to get my harasser to the police station. This time I had it all right. My harasser, a 25-year-old man who works as a security guard, spent five weeks in jail until the legal suit I meant to file was ready. Unfortunately, in the end, I gave in to the emotional pressure that I was subjected to from my family and him respectively. If it were for me I would have kept him behind bars," Mekkawi added. ECWR's study explains that some 41 per cent of harassers are seeking to overcome their sexual frustration, while 23 per cent of them view such behaviour as a sign of self-confidence and manhood. But Mekkawi views harassment as a product of a society riddled with double standards. "In our society, women are regarded as men's possessions, and ironically enough, mothers are guilty of perpetuating this notion. I work, study, take taxis and have my share of economic frustrations just like a man, yet I have to put up with my harasser," said Mekkawi, adding that she believes growing conservatism is actually to blame for the propagation of hypocrisy. "I think it is healthy to have a nightclub and a mosque in the same society -- but it is certainly not healthy to have the same person go to both places." According to sociologist Hoda Zakaria, the main cause for increased harassment is the fact that life has changed. From the 1970s onwards, Zakaria told the Weekly, the state removed its hand from the street, limiting the police's role to protecting figures of authority, the government and foreigners. This left average citizens without protection or safety, and gave outlaws the chance to move more freely. When a woman is harassed, so is the whole community, Zakaria says. Harassers aim to humiliate and take revenge from the community at large. The sociologist went on to argue that harassment was not limited to the socially marginalised and the sexually frustrated. Instead, harassers can be found at both ends of the social prism: the elite and the poorest. This is because the former can do whatever they want, and the latter have nothing to lose. At its core, harassment is, in Zakaria's eyes, a form of violence directed against successful young women; the losers try to blame them for their own failure. "Amidst all this violence comes a delicate flower who decided not to take this anymore. She spoke on television, when her harasser said she was indecent, because instead of keeping the incident to herself, she decided to not take the insult. Roushdi's harasser is all too similar to many men who would have quite liked her to shut up, because when she told her story she proved to be braver than all the men who either harass women themselves, or simply watch as women get harassed before their eyes," said Zakaria passionately. The sociologist added that Roushdi should be seen as a local hero whom we should commemorate in our songs and whose story should be told time and again till things change. While society hides its head in the sand, many non-governmental organisations have been working hard at defying sexual harassment in every possible way. "We are lobbying to amend the law in order to include the term 'sexual harassment,' hence all forms of harassment, in the criminal code," ECWR media representative Nahed Shihata told the Weekly. Meanwhile, in collaboration with other non- profit organisations, ECWR continues to lead the Respect Yourself campaign, as well as other media-based awareness efforts. On a parallel note, artists have also joined in the effort to defy sexual harassment. "Whole generations of girls in their early 20s have been subjected to one form or another of sexual harassment. It affects us in various ways," explained magazine managing editor Sondos Shabayek, whose graduation project in 2007 was a short film exposing sexual harassment in two different social contexts. "The media does not analyse. The media just focuses on momentarily following issues that are trendy. For the most part we neither address the topic properly nor do we dedicate enough time to it. Rarely, if ever, do talk shows interview victims, for example," Shabayek added. In contribution to the cause, Shabayek and a group of young women created the play Bossi (Look). Staged annually, the play is based on true stories of harassment that girls have suffered, and which actresses recount in monologue form. Testimonies of harassed girls reveal how harassment affects the way girls walk and think, and how it scars victims for life, even when it may just be a trivial matter to the harasser. It also tells of how women develop defence mechanisms, and hide their bodies when out and about. To Shabayek, sexual frustration is the core issue. "Amending the law is the answer, though it must be accompanied by awareness-raising among parents and their daughters. Girls should speak up," she said. Similarly, film director Mohamed El-Assiouty is currently working on a documentary on sexual harassment in Egypt. He explains that Egypt, second to Yemen, has developed a reputation for sexual harassment in the Arab world. According to his footage which gathers the stories of some 50 people living in Egypt, the worst offenders are adolescents aged up to 18 years. It is worth noting that the shooting of the documentary, which started off in 2005, has faced various obstacles. "Getting a permit from the police to shoot in the street is very difficult, in addition to the idea of producing a movie that some will deem to affect Egypt's reputation," El-Assiouty told the Weekly. "Another difficulty we faced was to convince female victims to stand in front of the camera and talk, not to mention the obstacles we've faced to gather sufficient funding." As for the origins of the problem, El-Assiouty believes the media is to blame. "It is polarised. Both religious programmes and pornography are shown. It is generally the case that the harasser watches both, and he does not calculate the damage he is inflicting on his victims while praying afterwards," he added. The answer, in his opinion, is to spread awareness among school students of both sexes, and to increase the number of police stations, run by trained policewomen, in order to promote the reporting of sexual harassment incidents.
