CAIRO: After tens of complaints from women of sexual harassment in Cairo's iconic Tahrir Square took place Tuesday in the mass protest calling for retrial of former officials, a social media initiative aimed at curbing the assaults was announced Wednesday on Facebook. The initiative, titled “Securing the Square,” aims to allow volunteers to monitor the square and report any misdeeds by men towards women. Sexual harassment in Egypt, considered a social plague by many, hits over two-thirds of women of all ages on Egyptian streets, according to a 2007 Egyptian Center for Women's Rights (ECWR) report. Women groups try to battle the widely common practice, but with little effect. Independent initiatives such as HarrassMap was created to monitor and report sexual harassment incidents by allowing women to directly report their stories online. Tahrir Square, the birth place of the Egyptian revolution, has been the scene of some serious harassment and assaults against women in 2011 and 2012. Yet, with weak legal precautions, men continue to practice it freely. “The square is a clean and sacred place there is no way we will allow sick and twisted people to distort its image and make people fear visiting it,” wrote Abdel Fatah Mohamed, one of the organizers of the initiative on Facebook. “The girl standing next to you is your sister, daughter or mother, it is not right to stand by while someone sexually harasses her,” commented Mahmoud Ahmed on the initiated Facebook page. “Go and stop the act even if you get hit … we should stand strongly against harassment as it has increased frightfully and there is no public safety at all,” Ahmed added. “Hardee's area (intersection of Mohamed Mahmoud with Tahrir square) is said to be the hot spot of harassment in Tahrir square,” wrote the HarassMap initiative on its Twitter account. HarassMap also called for women to carry colored spray cans to mark men who harass them in the square as a shaming device.
