Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Quick News Cap

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I’ve been working hard on my street harassment book and took a two day vacation over the weekend, so my posts have been lax the last week – sorry! Here’s a recap of three relevant news stories for the past week or so.

First, today journalist Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein goes on trial again in Sudan. Her crime is wearing pants in public. Rather than take lashings as other women who were arrested did or rather than take immunity from her job with the United Nations she is electing to go through a public trial in an effort to change the laws saying women cannot wear pants in public. Her original trial was scheduled for August but it got rescheduled to today. Best of luck to her!

Second, it’s been one year since the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights released its report on the high rate of public sexual harassment in Egypt. Bikya Masr writes about how little things have changed for women since then.

“The government and police have done little to enforce the laws in place, which call for up to one-year in prison and a hefty fine for perpetrators.

“The police chief told another man ‘what if this were to happen to a foreigner or even an ambassador’s wife? Then we would have a problem.’ I felt as if I was being demeaned because I was Egyptian,” said an Egyptian woman who recently took an incident to a local police office. She argued that the police do not seem to put much weight when it comes to average Egyptians complaining of harassment.

And it is Egyptian women who face the brunt of harassment on a daily basis. ECWR agrees, saying that “not addressing this problem leads to total injustice, especially since victims often hesitate to report incidents for lack of confidence in the legal system or fear of being blamed herself.”

Third (and lastly), there is an interesting article in the Yemen Times about street harassment. In January 2009, a survey revealed that most women experience street harassment and for many of them this causes fear and anxiety about going into public spaces. The article from last week covers the role of Sana’a’s police patrol who monitor the street for crimes like street harassment, the low report rate of harassment, and the impact of Sheikhs on negative attitudes about women being in public (punish women who are not modest and not cloistered etc). Educators suggest the importance of teaching both boys and girls not to harass each other and to report people who do.

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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Approaching Sexual Harassment from Religious Point of View

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As a follow up to my July 4 post, Time.com just published a good article about how the Egyptian government is tackling sexual harassment (including street harassment) through religion by distributing new books on sexual harassment to 50,000 imams at mosques across Egypt.

“The solutions proposed in the booklet — which include a greater adherence to religious and family values to better law enforcement — don’t necessarily match the advice preached by women’s groups, who focus primarily on drafting formal legislation on the matter and promoting female empowerment. Nevertheless, the ministry’s decision to address the issue at all, and on such a scale, may indicate a marked shift from the government’s stance just last year: that sexual harassment is the problem of just a few individuals. ‘It’s a big change,’ says Rasha Hassan, the main researcher at the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR). ‘Of course the government still needs to do a lot. But nowadays we can see some change in the ministries.'” …

“There are calls for the government to draft a law specifically aimed at curbing sexual harassment, but even that may not be enough. ‘I think that any law against sexual harassment in the streets or in the workplace is a good step forward,’ says Nadya Khalife, a Middle East expert in the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch. ‘However [it] still requires the government to effectively enforce the law by creating mechanisms to ensure that women do report sexual harassment incidents, and that these incidents are dealt with appropriately.’

Indeed, change may be slow to come, but in Egypt some activists are encouraged by the small signs of progress. ‘We can’t change the culture or the people in one day,’ says ECWR’s Hassan. ‘But we are trying to do a lot of things … We try to make changes with the government first, and then the people.’

It was just a year ago this month that the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights published it’s groundbreaking report about the extent that men harass women in Egypt and so to have the government trying to take the issue seriously now seems like great progress in that amount of time!

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Egyptian Street Harassment Activists Video Clip

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As a follow up to the post “Hear from Egyptian Activists,” which linked to an audio clip on the BBC website about Egyptian women fighting street harassment, the BBC recently posted this video on the same topic. In fact, as far as I can tell the text is identical, but the visuals make it worth hearing again.

[note: I’ve tried unsuccessfully to embed the video clip, so please follow the link to see it]

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Hear from Egyptian Activists

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BBC posted a new audio report today about the rise of activism in Egypt around the widespread problem of sexual harassment in public. A few weeks ago BBC reported on the increase in women taking self defense classes in Egypt to deal with their harassers. This audio clip includes interviews with some of those women.

There is an interview with one of the women at the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights about the survey they conducted last year. This woman said that too often Egyptian women are blamed for the harassment they receive because they were supposedly dressing provocatively, and that there’s a perception that if women didn’t dress in a certain way there wouldn’t be harassment. Well, in their survey (where 83 percent of women reported experiencing harassment and 2/3rds men said they engage in harassment), more than 70 percent of the women said they were wearing a veil when they were harassed. She said that was an important finding to show how pointless it is to blame victims for harassment crimes – women are harassed no matter what they wear!

Also interviewed in the clip were individuals involved in the “Respect yourself: Egypt still has real men” campaign in a Cairo neighborhood of Mohandiseen,  sponsored by Kelmetna, a magazine for young people. It targets Egyptian men and encourages Egyptian women to speak out, too. When members of the group asked men what they would do if they saw a woman being harassed by men, most reported that they would join in harassing her, especially if she was not dressed conservatively (!!).  A young man interviewed said he thinks that since people can’t marry until they’re older due to the economy, men are taking out their sexual frustration on women in the street, causing the rise is street harassment. The group holds rallies at universities and canvasses the streets, reminding taxi drivers and food vendors to uphold Egypt’s tradition of hospitality. On Facebook, the campaign has over 53,000 members.

I also found the following about the group:

“As part of the campaign, Kelmetna magazine hosts weekly seminars and discussions to raise awareness about the problem. It also offers self-defence classes for women so they can fight off harassers. In addition to seminars, the group members and volunteers, who are all aged between 14 and 24, take their work to the streets, talking to people about sexual harassment. One of their main goals when they approach people is to convince them to refrain from all types of sexual harassment as well as to speak out when they see it happening. The campaign also involves street concerts to raise awareness.”

Fantastic work!

(thanks to frequent reader Beckie for this story tip)

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Don't Women Lose Too?

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anti-harcellement-banniere1As discussed before, a survey conducted by the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights last year found that 83 percent of Egyptian women had been street harassed and about 98 percent of foreign women reported this experience while in Egypt.

In a French newspaper The Observers, Julie Marquet, a French graduate student in history who has backpacked across dozens of European, Asian, and South American countries wrote about her experiences in Cairo. Here is an excerpt:

“I travelled to Egypt with a girlfriend of mine for two weeks in the summer of 2003. We were both 19. It’s my worst travel memory ever: Egypt is not a place you can travel to individually, especially not for two young girls!

Everywhere we went there was some hand groping us, in the street, in buses or trains… They weren’t even shy about it: they grabbed our butts, sometimes even went under our shirts! This happened even if we were careful to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants, even when it was 40°C out! We were told by Franco-Egyptian friends that women weren’t supposed to be too exuberant in public, not to laugh, not to talk loudly, not be noticeable in any way. We tried to be as discreet and invisible as possible, but that didn’t change anything.  If we lashed out angrily at them it didn’t help at all: they would just laugh and never took us seriously.”

Traveling has so many benefits, including the chance to expand one’s horizon and understanding of the human race and world, and it’s a shame women can’t have the same freedom of mobility to go to new places (or old/familiar places for that matter) as men.

Egypt is addressing the high rate of street harassment of female foreigners with a new ad, which The Observers included in their article. The video clip, “shows a typical scène of a vendor harassing a European visitor in a market. At the end, a man’s voice says: ‘If you harass visitors, you’re not the only one who loses. The whole country has to lose.'”

Hmmm. Don’t the women who are harassed lose too, if not significantly more than the men who do the harassing? Like Julie, they have lost the right to be in public without being harassed or fearing harassment even if they try to be invisible…

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