EGYPT - “Cairo is safe for girls and women in 2011,” that is the main target of an international project that has started in Cairo and twenty towns worldwide at the beginning of this year. Lawyer Nehad Abul Komssan and Iman Beibars, the head of the Association of Development and Enhancement of Women, (ADEW), are responsible for the implementation of the project. “The project will be carried out in five shanty towns in Cairo; Mansheit Nasir, Ain el-Seira, Ezbet el-Hagana, Imbaba and Meit Okba,” according to Abul Komssan. The project was about the safety of women and girls who live in these areas, she noted, adding that it was set up as part of an initiative of three programmes connected to the United Nations and meant to be completed in two to five years. “ We have been concerned with the issue of protecting Egyptian women from harassment for five years. We received emails from educated girls, working women, elderly women and female lawyers who complained about their exposure to physical and psychological harassment in shopping malls, on means of transport, at the workplace and on campus,” she added. The matter led to studies in several provinces, Abdul Komssan said. They revealed that Egyptian women were exposed to a dangerous reality. Ninety-eight per cent suffered from different kinds of harassment and most of them were over 50, she noted. The Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights ��" a local organisation that gives legal aid to women ��" was inundated by complaints from women who experienced harassment on the street. The international project fights harassment in a practical way. It is keen to create safety by training police officers to protect women on the street. This in turn will create jobs in shanty towns. The project aims also at strengthening religious ethics among young people and is eager to draw up a mechanism of communication and co-operation between the Government, media and non-governmental organisations to increase women's safety. The centre's officials say 69 per cent of harassment cases occur on the street, 42 per cent on public means of transport, 22 per cent on the beach and only 6 per cent at work. Concerning sexual harassment, the Ministry of Religious Endowments has distributed a booklet in mosques and other places of worship in order to curb sexual harassment, which continues to claim more and more victims on the crowded streets. The 35-page booklet contains important information about harassment and an analysis of why this phenomenon has arisen in the largely conservative Egyptian society. Among many other things, the authors blame unemployment and provocative clothes worn by some women for the increase in harassment cases. The booklet urges women to wear modest clothes, so that stalkers would not be tempted. The head of ADEW, Iman Beibars, who was in charge of an earlier project in Mansheit Naser, told the semi-official newspaper Al-Ahram that the association had been concerned with women's issues for 25 years. Beibars said that her NGO conducted field studies and gained experience in dealing with inhabitants of shanty towns. Abul Komssan called for a law to consider sexual harassment a major crime.
