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When The Messiah Comes

Life & Events > Shame on Sexual Harassment
 

Shame on Sexual Harassment


Shame on Sexual Harassment

'Mourning a sexually harassed Egypt - Part 2'
by Marwa Rakha


Reuters published survey on sexual harassment in Egypt is still stirring angry
responses from Egyptian bloggers.

In her post titled "Shame and Sexual Harassment in Egypt", Mona
Eltahawy took a trip back in time and visited her early experiences with sexual
harassment:

When I was only 4 years-old, and still living in Cairo, a man exposed himself to me as I stood
on a balcony at my family’s home, and gestured for me to come down.

At 15, I was groped as I was performing the rites of the Haj pilgrimage at Mecca, the holiest site
for Muslims. Every part of my body was covered except for my face and hands.
I’d never been groped before and burst into tears, but I was too ashamed to
explain to my family what had happened.

During my 20s, when I had returned to Cairo and wore the hijab, a way of
dressing which again covers everything but the face and the hands, I was groped
so many times that whenever I passed a group of men I’d place my bag between me
and them. Headphones helped block out the disgusting things men — and even boys
barely in their teens — hissed at me.

With rare audacity Mona explicitly wrote about her disappointment with how the
police - supposedly a figure of authority - added insult to injury:

I learned to push and punch those whose hands thought my body was fair game,
but I never found anything to soothe the burning violation. So imagine how much
sharper that violation stung when I tried to complain to the police only to be
shooed away — or when it was their hands which groped me.

Once, a riot policeman fondled my breast while he was pushing back a group of
us journalists at the trial of an opposition politician. I yelled at him, and I
complained to his supervising officer, who moved him to the back row of riot
police and told me “Nevermind.”

Commenting on the published survey, Mona says:
So it was no surprise to learn that 98 percent of foreign women visiting Egypt and 83
percent of native Egyptian women who were recently surveyed said that they,
too, had been sexually harassed, and they have recounted a catalog of horrors
similar to mine. What an awful time to be woman in Egypt.

When the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights reported that 62 percent of Egyptian
men admitted to harassing women, I could only shudder at what sexist bullies so
many of my countrymen are.

Even worse, when I read that the majority of the more than 2,000 Egyptian men
and women that ECWR surveyed blamed women for bringing on the harassment
because of the way they dressed, I honestly thought my countrymen and women had
lost their minds.

Eltahawy digs deeper into the causes of such shameful behavior after
eliminating provocative clothes saying:

In Egypt today, up to 80 percent of women wear one form of veil or another — be
it a headscarf or a full-body veil that covers the face too — so you would
think it was obvious that sexual harassment had nothing to do with the way a
woman dresses.

So what is it that drives such a stubborn wish to fault women?

The answer lies in perhaps the saddest of all the Centre’s findings. Unlike
foreign women, most Egyptian women said women should keep their harassment to
themselves because they were ashamed or feared it could ruin their reputation.
That’s when I was taken back full circle to the time I was groped on the Haj.

Shame.

This shame is fueled by religious and political messages that bombard Egyptian
public life, turning women into sexual objects and giving men free reign to
their bodies.

In 2006, It was the well-publicized episode of the mufti of Australia
comparing women who didn’t wear the hijab to uncovered meat left out for wild
cats. He was educated at al-Azhar, the religious institution in Egypt that
trains clerics from all over the Sunni Muslim world. He was suspended, but his
reprehensible views are very much at work among many other clerics. Today, as
two bloggers in Egypt
reported recently, there are email and poster campaigns with a message that
uses candy to tell women that if they cover they will be safe from harassment,
as covered candy is safe from flies.

When did Egyptian women become candy and when did Egyptian men turn into flies?

Like many Egyptian women, Mona knows that:
There is no law criminalizing sexual harassment in Egypt, and police often refuse to
report women’s complaints. And when it is the police themselves who are
harassing women, then clearly women’s safety is far from a priority in Egypt.

And once again she highlights a well known fact to female demonstrators saying:
The State itself taught Egyptians a most spectacular lesson in
institutionalized patriarchy when security forces and government-hired thugs
sexually assaulted demonstrators, especially women, during an anti-regime
protest in 2005, giving a green light to harassers.

So there was little surprise that during a religious festival in 2006, a mob of
men went on a rampage in downtown Cairo,
sexually assaulting any woman they came across as police watched and did
nothing.

Mona concluded her post by shedding light on how Egyptians and Egyptian media
deal with incidents that are considered shameful or scandalous:
It was only when bloggers broke the news that the media reported the assaults.
Still, the Egyptian regime has never acknowledged it happened. At a demonstration
against sexual harassment that I attended in Cairo a few days later, there were nearly
more riot police than protestors.

My sister Nora was 20 at the time, and she, with several of her friends, joined
the protest. She had never been to a demonstration before but was incensed when
she heard the State was denying something that had happened to her many times.
We swapped our sexual harassment stories like veterans comparing war wounds,
and we unraveled a taboo which shelters the real criminals of sexual harassment
and has kept us hiding in shame.

And that is why I began here with my own stories — to free myself of the
tentacles of that shame.



You may view the latest post at

https://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/07/29/still-mourning-a-sexually-harassed-egypt/

posted on July 29, 2008 5:22 PM ()

Comments:

Shameful.
comment by elderjane on July 29, 2008 11:17 PM ()

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