CAIRO: As a disturbing account of sexual violence against award-winning Egyptian-American writer Mona el-Tahawy flooded in Thursday morning, many in Egypt are reminded of the countless sexual-based crimes suffered by women at the hands of Egyptian state authorities over the last year. “5 or 6 surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers,” el-Tahawy detailed on her official Twitter account Thursday morning, describing the crimes she suffered at the hands of Egypt police the night before. Reports of sexual violence against female demonstrators have littered the news in Cairo, where sexual harassment and violence is a distinct societal problem. An Amnesty International report published in March documented reports of female activists in Egypt who were beaten, given electric shocks, and subjected to strip searches, all while being photographed by male soldiers. They women were then forced to submit to “virginity checks” and threatened with prostitution charges. The statement from the UK-based human rights group added that this sort of treatment is torture when forced upon individuals. One activist, Samira Ibrahim, along with seven other women, submitted a formal complaint about the sexual abuse they suffered in military detention last March. They were all detained, abused and subjected to forced virginity tests, as documented in the Amnesty International report. Military prosecutors, however, have come forward to deny that they sexually abused the women, who were arrested at a demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square on March 9, under accusations that they were attempting to attack Egyptian army officers. “The military prosecution has no prisons,” said the head of Egypt's military prosecution, Hamdy Bedein, denying the charges completely. However, in May, an unnamed Egyptian general told CNN that the tests were indeed conducted. Surprisingly, he attempted to defend them. “The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine,” the general said in the interview. “These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs). We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place. None of them were (virgins).” According to a 2008 study published by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights (ECWR), 60 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women are harassed on a daily basis. BM
