This is a kind country. It's one that promotes family values. Its culture nurtures the old, the sick, the poor and children. Its strong religious beliefs, both Muslim and Christian, teach respect for women. Right. It's very possible that those statements might have been true of Egypt at one time, but I cannot, in all honesty, say that they are true of the Egypt that I live in. This is a difficult thing to say. I grew up in a family that was fiercely patriotic; the kind of patriotism that gets its strength from sheer distance. It was la Rochefoucald who said that distance diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as a wind would snuff out a candle, but fan a bonfire. Absence might not make the heart grow fonder on an individual basis, but it's a marvelous aphrodisiac for national pride. Egypt was always the place where people felt more, were kinder, were more generous. Even if they had little to give, they would share it. Women, in particular, were to be cherished and treated with respect. The culture, after all, positively glowed with religious references to how the Prophet Mohamed said that the person most worthy of your respect was your mother (three times over) and the Virgin Mary was the most blessed among women. Turned out, however, that absence does have its advantages. The clearest skin isn't a pretty sight under a microscope. And like many loves, Egypt is much better adored at a distance. Being a woman is tougher than being a man in most countries. It's especially the case in Egypt. Generally speaking, the fabled respect for women exists only in the fairy tales they tell to children before bedtime. The horror stories that emerged after the first day of Eid Al-Fitr have yet to be confirmed by any official source, but there has been enough activity on blogs and via the grapevine to indicate that something did happen. It's difficult to separate fact from lurid fiction, but the following appears to be confirmed. On the first day of the Eid, throngs of young men who were attempting to buy tickets for a film in the downtown area of Cairo rioted when the tickets sold out. They smashed windows, destroyed property and sexually harassed women who were in the area. By the second day, apparently, things were a little more organized. The rabid throngs had developed into brutal bands that tracked down women and in many cases tore their clothes off and groped them. One eyewitness account on a blog described how one woman desperately held her girls to her "as if she were trying to return them to her womb. Women who were with their husbands, brothers or fathers were not spared. And nowhere, in the middle of this flagrant abuse of law and order and of common decency, was there any sign of an official or police response. The police, apparently, can be hauled out en masse to beat down demonstrators, but not to protect citizens. Sexual harassment is not subject to passports and does not require any visas. If you're a woman in any country, you stand a good chance of being sexually harassed on myriad levels. In many countries, just walking down the street may be enough to draw unwelcome attention. This is very much the case in Egypt. A woman, any woman, between the ages of 12 and 60 is likely to be harassed; the scale ranges from coy, occasionally sweet and harmless comments tossed after you to the vilest form of actual physical assault. Those who make fun of the women's car on the metro as a form of regressive backwardness are not women who have had to suffer the indignity of public transport. For those women (and they constitute the majority of female commuters) the idea of not having to worry about being groped on a crowded bus comes as a blessed relief. Of course, physical abuse on public transport is possible in any country in the world, but in most countries, the woman is in a position to do something about it. She at least has the option of making an official complaint. That's possible, in Egypt, of course. Public harassment is actually against the law - there's a three-month prison sentence mandated for it (and that refers to verbal, not physical harassment). However, there are consequences, as a friend of mine found out when she attempted to file a complaint when she was mobbed by a group of teenage boys leaving their school in Mohandiseen at around 2:30 p.m. A police officer kindly explained the rules to her - a woman who files a harassment complaint has to do so at the vice department. Ergo, you end up with a file in your name, in vice. Not an honor that many women aspire to. Simply put, women are encouraged to shut up and put up with it. Harassers make their catcalls or worse with impunity because our culture mandates that decent women do not attract attention to themselves. Harassers who are surprised by a woman who vocally challenges their behavior usually react in two ways - surprise and a swift exit, or they can turn very ugly and occasionally violent. They do so because they can get away with it. And the fact that they can get away with it is an unmitigated shame to this country, our people and our culture. The hypocrisy of a culture that places such a high premium on the sanctity of women and their honor and yet allows its women to be objectified as cheap sexual objects and treated with such degrading disrespect is a constant source of astonishment, disgust and disappointment to me. There can be any number of reasons - poverty, sexual frustration, a rising religious conservatism that demands that women stay at home and cover up. None of these factors justify the wretched treatment that women in this country receive. This is not the country that I was raised to love and respect. Nor is it the country that I first knew almost 20 years ago. In that country, if someone groped a woman on a bus, the closest three men would have stood up and smacked him across the head, irrespective of who the woman was. These men had mothers and sisters and wives and they would not have permitted something like that to happen to any of them. And any one of the women on that bus could have been their wife or sister. Ten years ago, my sister saw an argument on a bus where a man who had just groped a woman assaulted her when she dared to object. He grabbed the front of her clothes and tossed her around like a rag doll. The woman was wearing a khimar - the kind of veil that covers the entire upper body like a tent - and she was carrying a baby. No one on the bus said anything. The bus driver asked the man to get off the bus, but no one else lifted a finger to help the woman. So perhaps the mass assaults over the Eid should not have come as too much of a surprise. Perhaps one shouldn't be surprised that marauding bands of young men feel that they can act this way with impunity. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that a government that can't seem to be bothered to protect the basic civil rights of its citizens should feel any compunction to give a damn about a couple of dozen women who might have been assaulted. The only ray of light was that the women who came under assault fled into shops and homes and were protected by shopkeepers, building security men and passing taxi drivers. These tiny glimpses of humanity and common decency were the only reason to continue to believe in the country that we were raised to love and respect. Perhaps as long as there are a few who will put themselves in harm's way to protect a stranger then there is hope for the rest of us. Mirette F. Mabrouk is the Publisher of The Daily Star Egypt.
