I grew up in Cairo learning how to strategize my life to avoid sexual harassment. I would make sure to run my errands during a football match when men and boys in the neighborhood are busy watching, not before or after. I knew which routes to take to school, and that I can only go to cafes to meet my friends, but never to public parks.
I always took sexual harassment as a fact of life that I need to deal with. It never struck me as a plaguing problem until, as a 25-year old professional, I realized that I spend a significant portion of my income on a “precaution budget” against sexual harassment. For example, I had to go out at expensive restaurants but not the more affordable “men-only” cafes or free public parks, and I had to resort to private taxi rides over public buses. I even turned down jobs because they had no accessible parking, which will take me back to the dreadful public bus. And even with all these precautions, I was still harassed in the few minutes that I have to walk every day between my parked car and any building.
I felt very lonely in this shameful experience. But when I talked to one friend after another, I found that it happened to every other woman I know, and that it was not my fault. So I decided that the first step in building up resistance against this shameful behavior, is to create awareness, and tell other women that it is not their fault, and they should not let sexual harassment go unpunished.
Through common friends, I met Rebecca, Engy, and Amel, and we established Harassmap: an open online mapping tool to end the social tolerance of sexual harassment. We help victims, like us, speak out and access support services, and contribute to changing the environment in our streets to no longer tolerate harassers. Our initiative has three prongs: online crowdsourcing of harassment reports, offline street campaigns in target locations, and referral to psychological/legal support services.
Our first year of work was a learning experience for us first and foremost. The reports we received on our portal (540 in the first year) showed that there is no typical harasser or victim. The demographic features of the former ranged across teenagers, university professors, medical doctors –and children in 83 cases; whereas the victims were young and old, women and men, veiled, face-veiled and not.
This insight was a strong foundation for our offline campaigns. It was important to feel confident as we debunked the justifications of harassers to violate women’s safety as such. “Look how she’s dressed”, “It’s her fault for going out so late”, “men are sexually frustrated” are all too common excuses. Conversely, knee-jerk condemnation or patronizing media discourse were evidently ineffective, we had to speak grassroots language and immerse within the grassroots. Now, more than 500 HarassMap volunteers go out once per month to ask shop owners, police, doormen and others with a presence in the street to send the message: harassment will not be tolerated!
In 2012-2013 we are working on strengthening our efforts on the ground. Public order enforcement by community figures (mainly doormen) is very evident in Egypt and it is important to win it on our side. Therefore we aim to strengthen community outreach teams to become more independent as they interact with respective communities. On the other hand, we hope to expand our intervention beyond street harassment, to include workplace, school and university. Finally, we are encouraging the Egyptian police to work together and use our reporting system to target enforcement areas.
Sawsan Gad is a GIS Analyst and the co-founder of HarassMap.
