According to news reports on Wednesday, an Egyptian man and his family tied up their daughter and threw her into the Nile river as a result of a divorce to her aging husband, who mistreat her and abused the young woman. Luckily, a fisherman saw the girl and rescued her before she died, Emirates 24/7 reported. According to their report, the girl had initially refused to marry the elderly man, but then acquiesced to her family pressure and wed, the report, which cited local Egyptian newspapers said. After she and the man divorced over abuse, she returned to her family, who when the girl refused to remarry the man, was tossed into the river in an “honor crime.” Women's rights groups in Egypt told Bikyamasr.com that they are working with police currently to gather more information about the case and would soon be interviewing and assisting the young woman. But they could give no further details on the situation, or the woman's health. “If this is really what happened, then it shows that there is a lot of work to counter honor violence in this country, where women and girls are killed because, simply, they are women,” Nora Tarek, a university student and women's rights researcher in Cairo, told Bikyamasr.com. “We need help and we need to speak up.” Last year, a 22-year-old woman was found dead on the Marsa Matrouh coastal road, with a noose around her neck, fully dressed and bleeding. Identifying the body and asking the family for information, the woman's uncle confessed that her brother, an unemployed laborer, killed his married younger sister after he accused her of fleeing her home with a stranger. weak sentences are often given to male relatives who murder their female relatives, with judges often viewing the case with leniency. Between the year 2002 and 2003, The Association of Legal Aid for Women, (CWELA) began compiling and analyzing press coverage of 20 daily newspapers and weekly magazines that dealt with domestic violence in Egypt. CEWLA's report also showed that the perpetrators of violence were males in 75 percent of the cases and women represented 25 percent. The perpetrators were the husbands (52 percent), the fathers (10 percent), brothers (10 percent), the mothers (four percent) the rest were the sons, relatives of the husband or of the wife, the step father or the step mother. The types of violence were murder (76 percent), attempt to murder (5 percent), battering (18 percent), kidnapping 2.5 percent and the rest were different types such as burning property, forcing women to sign checks and become guarantors of men, accusation of insanity, etc. The report indicated that causes of violence were honor crimes (42 percent), leaving the house without the husband's approval (7.5 percent), wives asking for divorce (3 percent). BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/Iy2gq Tags: Egypt, featured, Honor, Marriage, Violence Section: Editor's choice, Egypt, Features, Human Rights, Latest News, Women
