CAIRO: After suffering a brutal sexual assault at the hands of a mob of rowdy Egyptian men in Cario's Tahrir Square, CBS news correspondent Lara Logan says that she now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, with memories of the incident still haunting her nearly a year after the attack. Amid celebrations marking the ouster of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, Logan was in Tahrir Square preparing for a live report for America's CBS News. Suddenly, the crowd turned violent. A mob of men ripped the 40-year-old correspondent away from her crew and bodyguard, tearing at her clothes and beating her in broad daylight. “People don't really know that much about [post-traumatic stress disorder],” she told the New York Daily News in her latest interview on the incident. ”There's something called latent PTSD. It manifests itself in different ways. I want to be free of it, but I'm not.” In an interview with “60 minutes” in April, Logan spoke publicly about the incident for the first time. She confided that the attack lasted for about 25 minutes, as 200 to 300 men assaulted her. She feared for her life and imagined that she would not survive, she explained. Logan was finally pulled to safety by an Egyptian woman and a soldier who witnessed the attack. She and her team were brought back to their hotel, where she received an examination and medical treatment. She returned to the United States the following morning where she entered hospital for four days. Logan confided in her latest interview that nightmares about the incident come at unexpected times, like when she is tucking her infant daughter into bed. Instances of sexual assaults on female journalists covering the events in Tahrir Square have continued in the year since Mubarak's ouster. According to studies conducted by the Egyptian Center for Women's Right (ECWR) in 2008, 98 percent of foreign women and 83 percent of Egyptian women surveyed had experienced sexual harassment in Egypt. Meanwhile, 62 percent of Egyptian men confessed to harassing women and 53 percent of Egyptian men faulted women for “bringing it on.” When award-winning Egyptian-American columnist Mona el-Tahawy detailed a horrific sexual assault by Egypt police on her personal Twitter account after she was detained for nearly 12 hours in Cairo on November 24, the debate about sexual violence in the square became reignited. “Besides beating me, the dogs of CSF subjected me to the worst sexual assault ever,” she said on Twitter. “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,” she wrote. One day after, Caroline Sinz, a French reporter for public TV station France 3, became the third women sexually assaulted – and reported – while reporting from Tahrir. As more women like Logan, el-Tahawy and Sinz bravely come forward to speak about these instances of abuse, public awareness about the issues facing women in Egypt has improved and helped to foster a healthy dialogue about addressing this disturbing social pandemic. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/cviHq Tags: featured, Lara Logan, Tahrir Section: Egypt, Latest News, Sexual Harassment, Women
