Holidays and festivals are often rife with sexual harassment/street harassment and there are regularly targeted anti-harassment campaigns during them in places like Egypt and India.
This year, for the holiday Eid al-Adha in Egypt (Oct. 14-15), the government also got involved!
“The Interior Ministry is planning to deploy criminal investigations personnel in all major public streets, squares, and parks in Egypt during Eid al-Adha to arrest any sexual harassers, a security source in the ministry told Youm7 on Monday.
Many Egyptians go out for picnics and other leisure activities during Eid al-Adha. Sexual harassment has become a rising phenomenon in Egypt’s streets in the past few years, especially the holidays.
Minister of Interior Mohamed Ibrahim assigned the criminal investigations department to deploy forces in public areas to firmly confront any sexual harassment in an unprecedented official plan.
Many anti-sexual harassment groups have reported intolerance from the Ministry of Interior towards sexual harassment and even accused the ministry’s personnel of harassing women themselves.
‘I Saw Harassment’ is an initiative against harassment whose founders present a pressure group that works on monitoring and documenting sexual harassment crimes against women. The group said in a statement on Monday that the initiative’s volunteers will be focusing on Downtown Cairo, including Tahrir Square and the Nile Corniche, where most reports of sexual harassment are made.
The initiative’s volunteers are trained to peacefully intervene in cases of mob sexual harassment and sexual violence to rescue any victim.”
Hopefully this means the Egyptian government is changing and will begin to take this issue more seriously (and not harass people…).
Read more about the efforts of the “I Saw Harassment” Team (Arabic).
H/T Chai Shenoy, Co-Founder of Collective Action for Safe Spaces
Update:
In Alexandria, Egypt, there was also a campaign over the holiday called “Harass the Harasser.”
“The campaigners were active within the busiest districts of the Mediterranean city, where chances of sexual harassment are high, such as San Stefano, the vicinity of the Biblotheque, Mahat El-Raml, in addition to several public parks. “The aim of the campaign is to stand against sexual harassment, which is prevalent in holidays,” Mansour Hamdy, one of the campaigners told Al-Ahram’s Arabic news website, pointing out that the campaign was active in Cairo last year.”
