Violence Against Women

Egyptians call the Sphinx “abu hol,” the father of terror. But the real father of terror for women in the country is fear of rape.

The threat of sexual violation has long been a tool keeping women from going to the public square to demand their political rights. In the last 10 years, the number of covered women in Egypt has increased so dramatically that in downtown Cairo, hardly a bare female head is seen. This public display of modesty hides an ugly secret: women, covered or uncovered, suffer sexual violence, unreported rape, and sexual harassment in silence in Egypt, mainly because they bear the shame for such crimes, and can be shunned, beaten, or even killed for them.

One of the greatest, if not the greatest, steps forward in postrevolutionary Egyptian women’s lives is that a few women have stood up and challenged the double-threat of sexual violence and shame, simply by talking.

I met Samira Ibrahim on a dusty highway outside a walled military court in suburban Cairo this week, where she was appearing in a court case she brought against the Egyptian army for performing a “virginity test” on her while she was in their custody. Ibrahim is a short, fierce young woman in a bright headscarf and blue jeans, avidly texting on her Nokia. From Sohag, a midsized town in upper Egypt, she sued the army because, after being arrested in Tahrir Square last March, she was fingered by a man in uniform, in an open room with soldiers standing around with cellphone cameras.

When I met her, she was deeply annoyed, having driven two hours through Cairo traffic for a hearing, only to be told hours later that a civilian doctor would have to come in and testify about the test on another day. She’s lost her job and gets death threats daily, and will now have to contend with years of interaction with Egypt’s inefficient and corrupt judiciary system.

Ibrahim says she has no regrets. Her suit—incredibly, encouraged by her father, a political activist who protested Mubarak’s rule for years—broke new ground.

Human-rights researcher Dalia Abd Elhameed, with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, had heard of virginity tests before the revolution from women subjected to them in jail or in shelters, but no one would speak publicly. “We just never had a face, so no one believed us,” she said. “Once Samira Ibrahim spoke out, we had a face. And now, it’s a different story. It becomes, I’m not ashamed of myself. I am ashamed of you.

“Victims are always told, it’s your fault: you were out too late, your dressed wrong. So rape is severely, severely under-reported. Police are not friendly to women. If you report a rape to them, they will immediately suspect you of being a prostitute.”

Prostitution was what the army threatened to charge Ibrahim with after picking her up in Tahrir Square with other women on March 9, 2011. During five days in custody, Ibrahim says she was first tortured with electrical prods. One day, all the women were lined up and asked to identify themselves as virgins or nonvirgins and form separate lines. The nonvirgins—Ibrahim was one—were led to an open room, where a uniformed man performed the pseudo scientific test.

Since filing her suit, a judge has ruled the tests illegal, Ibrahim is nationally famous, and her supporters are constantly twittering her encouragement. She also receives daily death threats.

Virginity tests are only one point on a spectrum that includes under-reported rapes on one end and a virulent plague of sexual harassment on the other. Egyptian women say streets and shops have become obstacle courses of catcalls, suggestive comments, gropes and pinches—a plague that keeps women in the Middle East firmly in their places, out of the public sphere.

Rebecca Chiao hasn’t gotten her hair cut since she last visited a salon a year ago, when the guy blow-drying her hair suddenly shoved his hands down the front of her shirt and squeezed. She went home shaken to the core, and then started a sexual-harassment-reporting website, harassmap.org, which maps reports and sends out hundreds of volunteers to talk to neighborhoods about why it’s a bad idea to harass women.