According to a survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR), service workers, housewives and professionals alike all report experiencing sexual harassment in Egypt.
40 percent of all respondents reported inappropriate touching, followed by verbal harassment at 38 percent. Moreover, for around 30 percent of the respondents, harassment comes in daily doses. Only 12 percent of respondents reported to police when they are harassed, uttering their total lack of confidence in the legal system to protect them from the perpetrators.
Other statistics by ECWR stated that sexual harassment in Egypt is experienced by 98 percent of foreign women visitors and 83 percent of Egyptian women. Shocking, some 62 percent of Egyptian men admitted harassing women and 53 percent of men accused women with “asking for it non-verbally.”
With a quick glance at the numbers, one can conclude that this deeply-rooted social problem cannot be neglected anymore.
“This phenomenon started to suffocate me; I hated all kinds of public transportation because of it,” said a 21-year-old university graduate.
“I believe the harassers should be punished publicly in one way or another to become a deterrent to others”, she added.
Despite a new draft law criminalizing such attacks currently being discussed, many still view harassment as being hard to apply in the absence of a fully efficient security system in the country.
“Toughening the sanctions is a step forward but it will not limit this phenomenon by itself,” said Mona Ezzat of the New Woman Foundation.
“Other supplementary procedures are required to eliminate the problem as possible.”
Ezzat spoke of the importance of the presence of specialized departments in police stations and specialized prosecutions qualified to investigate such cases, which might encourage harassed women, hand in hand with the media and education systems of the country, to report their cases to the police.
“But this would require a quick treatment of the security measures of the country after the 25th of January” revolution, added Ezzat.
“Sure I would report it if someone hassled me through SMS,” said the girl, who asked that her name remain anonymous.
“Yet, I believe that our society needs a comprehensive moral reform, you know, you can be harassed by a police officer in the streets,” she continued.
Although the draft ordinance criminalizes, for the first time, the act of using SMS to harass or stalk someone; the New Woman Foundation has questioned the overall nature of the text of the law.
According to Ezzat, harassment in workplace is a more complicated dilemma than in public places; thus its self-prepared draft law previously sent to the former cabinet, the New Woman foundation has concentrated on this subject in a separate article for its importance in their view point.
“What would guarantee that if a woman reported a harassment case to the police against her boss for example, that she won’t be subjected to other forms of pressure like expulsion from work,” questioned Ezzat.
“It is a positive step, I believe, that the government started to admit the presence of a serious problem, but it is unacceptable to let them seize the decision making process regarding what is supposed to be based on a societal discussion,” stated Ezzat.
As a means of pressure to push the authorities to a dialogue where all concerned organizations and entities can express their views and suggestions, before the revolution the foundation held a number of meetings with some of these organizations and various lawyers of the Constitutional Court to speak up about the issue, along with some of the former female parliament members.
“We will continue to demand the concept of societal dialogue about this issue after the 25th of January [revolution] and will carry on the initiatives we started to eliminate and abolish all forms of sexual violence against women,” Ezzat told Bikya Masr.
“Although we care much about women in this concern, our ordinance didn’t differentiate between men and women in the sanctions and asked to apply proper sanctions to the crime,” she added.
The New Woman Foundation has launched a campaign to raise awareness among people about the issue and to let them pass suggested solutions of their own to the public.
The foundation also prepared a work plan to reactivate the “typical” authorities such as the parliament, in their concern with passing a respectable law that preserves the dignity of women.
Until the dilemma around the new law is solved, women now can use another tool that may help them protect themselves.
HarrasMap is an online initiative launched by four young women. They created a website that uses an interactive map that highlights the hotspots of sexual harassment in Egypt.
Anyone can contribute to the map by identifying the kind of abuse they were subjected to, choosing from nine listed categories, which include everything ranging from inappropriate touching to stalking to phone calls and even to facial expressions.
“That way women can just go in, locate the area they need to go to on the map and zoom in to find the level, and kind of harassment,” said Engy Ghozlan, one of the founders of the site.
By any means the new draft law should be a step forward to bring down the wall of silence built around the case by the government, who instead of condemning the mass sexual harassment that took place in October 2006 in central Cairo, it accused those who captured the events on video and published them on the Internet of “defaming the state.”