Assaults

By Mona Eltahawy

When a mob went on a rampage of sexual assaults in downtown Cairo during the recent Eid holiday, the State-controlled media studiously ignored the issue for days.

Two long-marginalized sections of Egyptian society shook that blithe blind eye awake however and helped focus it on the audacious attacks: the young, in the form of bloggers who wrote about the attacks, and women, who flooded the comments section of those blogs with a compendium of horror stories of their own sexual harassment. Both forced the assaults onto the national agenda.

Ever since the arrival 10 years ago of the Arab news channel al-Jazeera, much has been made of the ability of the so-called New Arab media – in the form of satellite television – to give a voice to the previously voiceless: dissidents and activists who have long opposed Arab regimes but who had little or no access to state-controlled media.

Al-Jazeera and its many competitors certainly have helped give a platform to many of those dissidents and activists. But the satellite channels remain the purview of the old in a region where the majority of the population is below the age of 25.

Enter the blogs

To appreciate what blogs can do, let’s return to the sexual assaults in downtown Cairo on 23 October.

The sexual attacks were shocking in their systematic viciousness . Eye witnesses said the mob went from one woman to the next with a determination that did not discriminate between veiled and unveiled, young and old and at one point even dragged a woman out of a taxi in which she had tried to escape.

The old, lame excuses were pulled out, of course. They ranged from the ridiculous: the women asked for it simply by being in a crowded part of town; to the surreal: a belly dancer who had performed outside of cinema that was showing the premier of her film was to blame for arousing the mob.

If sexual harassment has been the ugly daily backdrop for so many Egyptian girls and women, what had turned it into such a violent foreground?

To answer that, you must first walk in the shoes of Egyptian women and try to imagine being the object of that daily harassment.

I can draw a map of all the different places I have been sexually harassed in Cairo. The downtown area would be especially dense, with dots for the various times a man or a boy groped me from behind as I took various modes of transport, as I was leaving a restaurant or just simply as I walked along a street. I hit those I could reach, but too often they got away too quickly.

My ears burn from the crude and disturbingly graphic sexual propositions that men have flung my way.

And when it comes to stalking, for every taxi that stops, there are at least two or three cars that slow down and whose drivers must imagine that every woman standing alone is a prostitute in the making.

Humiliation and violation

The ugly fingerprints of sexual harassment have stained us all.

Ask any woman in Egypt if she has experienced sexual harassment and she will give you that same litany of the innocuous and the menacing.

That was certainly the sad conclusion I reached when I brought up the issue with my sister Nora and her friends on the campus of the American University in Cairo recently, as we waited for others to join us so that we could head off to a demonstration against the Eid sexual assaults.

“A man wouldn’t stop following me in his car until I yelled so loud he got out and begged me to stop,” said one of the young women.

“A man once brushed up against my breast when I was in a store and waited for me to come out so that he could make eye contact with me, to force me to acknowledge it and then smirked and walked away,” said another.

“A man once asked me for the time at the entrance to the Cairo metro and as I looked at my watch I realized he was masturbating as he was talking to me and I quickly moved away in horror,” I told the young women.

I am 39 years old and my sister and her friends are in their late teens and early 20s - different generations but the same sad stories of humiliation and violation.

Those stories of humiliation and violation that occur daily on the streets of Cairo are often met with a shrug by a policeman who usually utters the Egyptian colloquialism “maalesh” which means “never mind”.

'Shocked but not surprised'

Knowing the number of times that “maalesh” has been said to mollify women’s complaints of sexual harassment, I was not surprised to hear about the Eid sexual assaults. I was horrified of course but not surprised.

I was not surprised that the police stood by and did nothing as young men viciously and systematically chased down young women, groping some and ripping the clothes off the backs of others.

I was shocked but not surprised that everyone was blamed but the perpetrators themselves.

For years, the laws criminalizing sexual harassment have gathered dust in their books as police indifference colluded with the shame and the blame heaped on women to keep us silent.

The viciousness of the Eid attacks and the determination of the Egyptian government to ignore them helped us shatter that silence.

But there is another sinister new addition to all of that. And it is that sinister new addition that must be blamed squarely along with the men who actually carried out the assaults.

And that sinister new addition is what happened on 25 May 2005. On that day, pro-government thugs and security forces sexually assaulted female journalists and anti-government protestors.

That was the day that pro-government thugs and security forces sexually assaulted female journalists and demonstrators during an anti-government protest.

That was the day the State gave a green light to any and every man to sexually assault women. If the State itself, in the form of its security forces, can sexually assault women with such impunity, what is to stop a mob from doing so in downtown Cairo?

State of denial

Certainly not those same security forces whose sole job it has become to protect President Hosni Mubarak and his regime. And that same regime would have had us disbelieve the eye witnesses to the recent assaults if it could have. The government denies women were attacked during the Eid.

That State that sexually assaulted women on 25 May 2005 is the same state that sent its riot police to surround our demonstration outside the Press Syndicate on Nov. 9. And it is that same State that sent hundreds of riot police and plainclothes security agents on Nov. 14 to prevent 50 women from demonstrating outside the cinema where the assaults began during Eid. Egyptian police arrested 8 people at that attempted demonstration. Not a single person has been arrested for the Eid assaults.

The priorities of those security forces are clear – they are there to protect the State, not women.

Voice of the bloggers

But here’s what the State didn’t count on – blogs, and the voice they have given young people, particularly women.

It was a combination of the writing of those young bloggers who had either witnessed the assaults themselves or who had heard of them, and the comments that poured into those blogs from women sharing their own horror stories of sexual harassment that forced the assaults onto the national agenda.

While the Interior Ministry continues to consider the bloggers’ exposes an attempt to ruin Egypt’s image, satellite television channels now nightly dissect the issue. But the psychological surgery will cure nothing until we take a stab at the real, rotten core of this issue: we live in a State that has given the green light to sexual assaults.

And the bloggers have been happy to roll up their sleeves and make that critical incision.

Many of them have made the connection between the events of May 25, 2005 and the Eid assaults. Many bloggers were active in last year’s street protest movement and would post photographs from demonstrations as well as the date and place of the next protest. Some witnessed themselves last May’s assaults and so were more than ready to connect them to the Eid assaults.

Their ability to do so put them head and shoulders above the State-controlled media. The government-controlled press would begrudgingly dedicate just a few lines to news of the pro-reform demonstrations but only to report that they had disrupted traffic.

Waking the media

But after the bloggers posted prolifically about the Eid assaults, the story was picked up by the Associated Press and Egyptian satellite channels – some privately owned and others that fall under State control – which finally began to stir and to pay attention.

In June 2005, there were an estimated 280 blogs in Egypt. By this summer, that number had risen to 1,000.

After forcing the Eid assaults onto the national agenda at the end of October, blogs in Egypt were once more in the headlines in early November in another sign of their growing importance.

The Associated Press reported that police arrested Abdel-Kareem Nabil, a well-known secular blogger, in Alexandria. A police officer said the arrest was in relation to an article Nabil had posted on the internet.

The blogging community launched a “Free Kareem” campaign that resembled one they organized last year when Nabil was arrested briefly in October 2005 after he wrote an internet article blasting Islamist riots outside a Coptic Christian church.

The day before Nabil was arrested this month, Reporters Without Borders said it had added Egypt to its list of states that are deemed to be the worst suppressors of freedom of expression on the internet. The organization also expressed concern over a recent Egyptian court ruling that said an Internet site could be shut down if it posed a threat to national security.

In the United States, much airtime and newsprint is devoted to the seemingly endless debate over whether blogs will ever replace the mainstream media and whether bloggers should be considered reporters or not.

In Egypt, the debate is a much more fundamental one. It is not only about freedom of expression in general but more specifically about the voice that blogs have given to the voiceless – the women and the young. If the Egyptian regime feels threatened by that, then the blogs surely are doing something right.

Mona Eltahawy is a New York-based commentator and international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues. Her website is at www.monaeltahawy.com. This first appeared in Saudidebate.com