A no-go zone finds expression on TV, writes Salonaz Sami Ostrich technique is how Egyptians routinely respond to sexual harassment and rape: bury your head in the sand. Yet the rate of such crimes is on the rise and, though cinema has dealt with them on a number of occasions, it wasn't until this Ramadan that they made their way into television. Written by Mohsen El-Gallad and directed by the Jordanian filmmaker Cairo Film Festival award winner Mohamed Azizia, Qadeyat Ra'i A'am (A case of public opinion) tackles the issue head on. Youssra plays Abla Abdel-Rahman, head of the pediatric department at Qasr Al-Aini Hospital, the perfect wife and mother of two, who is kidnapped and raped while driving home with a fellow female physician and a pregnant nurse. The hospital from which they have set off is distant, they are late; and the three armed rapists find it relatively easy to accomplish their task. When the nightmare is over the women return to their lives - only to realise they have an even worse nightmare ahead of them: the very, very complicated task of how to deal with what happened. The storyline recounts how each goes about resolving the dilemma of whether to report the incident and take on the incumbent shame or to keep it a secret and suffer the psychological damage in isolation. But when the nurse loses her child and goes into a coma as a result, Abdel-Rahman decides to broach the issue. Bad move, apparently: her decision to report the incident to the police instantly stigmatises Abdel-Rahman, whose very husband - a fellow doctor who is happy to perform miscarriages illegally but won't accept the shame of his wife's body having been violated - can no longer live with her. Initially he gives her the choice of directing him back to where the rape took place or separating, but then he decides the sheer humiliation she has brought upon him and the children is unbearable. Nor is this as warped as it sounds, in context: Youssri brilliantly portrays the typical Egyptian male mentality, sympathetic at heart but unable to handle disgrace, torn between an abiding love for his high- school sweetheart and social pressures. Fortunately others have more mettle: the chief investigator (Sami El-Adl) is not put off even when it turns out the villa in question belongs to a cabinet minister; he is as persistent as he is determined. The most complex role of all, that of Abdel-Rahman's younger colleague (Leka' Al-Khamisi), brings into focus a whole range of other issues: educated and middle-class, this young doctor is engaged to be married to her cousin, the love of her life; and much as she would love to report bring the rapists to justice, she cows in to her family's insistence that she should have her hymen surgically sewn back together - known technically hymenoplasty, the process has been the subject of much public debate - and play dumb; whatever she does she must never let her fiancé find out about the rape. Her brother (Amr Abdel-Gelil) sums up her originally Upper Egyptian family's feelings about her having lost her virginity out of wedlock when he tearfully tells her, "Had they just killed you, it would've been better." The wise words are left to her aging father: "When the chicken is held down to be slaughtered there is nothing the chicken can do about it." Yet the predominant feeling is that she could have protected her honour with her life, and so the young doctor, disheartened, decides to break off the engagement. For their part the perpetrators(Ahmed Flouks, Amr Samir, and Ashraf Misilhi), while leading different lives, share drug addictions and lack of parental guidance - the usual reasons behind evil on Egyptian TV: a poor handyman who blames his mother for asking him to drop out of school to help support the family after his father abandoned them; a middle-class student who lives with his younger sister and elderly grandmother while his parents work abroad; and the rich minister's son who has everything he has ever wanted but lacks a perspective on life. Stereotypical, all in all. And yet this serial bravely ventures where no TV show has dared go before, critiquing this society's tendency to blame the victims where honour is concerned. "Our society," Youssra told the daily Al-Ahram, "turns rape victims into prostitutes." It's always the woman's fault, she added, whether because of the way she is dressed or for being out late; in Europe, rapists are tried even when their victims are actually prostitutes. Her views are borne out by an Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights report on sexual harassment in Egypt, which concluded that 30 percent of the female population are harassed on a daily basis: "It is not about the woman's age, beauty or clothing. It's about the fact that she is a woman." Indeed, according to a study conducted by Fadia Abu Shahba, a criminal law professor at the National Centre for Criminal and Social Studies, Cairo witnesses 20,000 rape and sexual harassment crimes per year - nearly two incidents every hour. The study also shows that 90 percent of the perpetrators are unemployed. A 2000 UN report on women from across the country says that, while 45.5 percent of the sample were harassed or raped, only 5.2 percent reported it to the police. Will the perpetrators of this case of public opinion be placed behind bars, however? That remains to be seen.
