Violence Against Women

On the night former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison, 26-year-old IT officer Nihal Saad and four of her friends joined the tens of thousands who returned to Tahrir Square to protest the verdict, which many believed would be reversed on appeal. At 8:30 p.m., they were attacked by a group of men whose numbers seemed to double by the minute.

The perpetrators crammed in so tight, Saad couldn’t lift her arms, she said; the sexual assault began. It felt like they were touching everywhere. One of Saad's friends was the biggest target: they pulled off her shirt, then her pants, raping her with their hands. When the group finally got away, an hour and a half later, they went straight to the hospital.

It was not an isolated incident.

On and off for the last week—as voters head to the polls in the second round of presidential elections scheduled for June 16 and 17 after a week of renewed demonstrations at Tahrir—large groups of men have sexually attacked women at the birthplace of Egypt's 18-day revolution last year that brought down the Mubarak regime.

In response to the assaults, Saad and her friends had planned a march to call for gender equality and demand the right to assemble without fear. On Friday night, around 50 women heeded their call, chanting for a little over an hour—until men swarmed their protective human cordon and again attacked. Men seemed to appear from nowhere, grabbing, groping, ripping clothes, stealing phones and money.

Sexual harassment is endemic in Egypt, but assault by groups of dozens or hundreds of men is not. “It didn’t seem normal. Everything about it was wrong. It didn’t seem like the day-to-day harassment that women get, it seemed organized,” Saad says of what’s been happening over the last week in Tahrir.

Her friend Leil-Zahra Mortada, a filmmaker who participated in the march, put it another way: “Big groups, this is what made us suspicious. Would all of the sexual harassers in Cairo just gather in front of Hardee’s?” he asked about the restaurant where most of the large attacks transpired.

Some activists have called the spat of group assaults a coordinated effort to keep women out of the political sphere, while others see it as Egypt’s deep-rooted patriarchy at work. But there’s broad agreement that the attacks are likely to damage the revolutionary movement, and discourage women from broader participation in politics.

“I’m sure this will affect the revolution negatively. We have seen during the 18 days before Mubarak was brought down, women were there, there was not a single harassment report, nothing happened. It was very inclusive—men, women, Muslims, Christians, everyone. It was like heaven,” says Dalia Ziada, executive director of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, who thinks the harassment was spontaneous.

“As soon as the revolution stops being inclusive, it leads to dire consequences,” she said. “It will make women revolutionaries stay at home and not participate. Thus, it will weaken the protests and the cause behind the protests.”

Egypt is a patriarchal country, and women are underrepresented in government, protests, and the workforce. Sexual harassment is rampant. A 2008 study by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights found that 83 percent of Egyptian women have experienced some amount of sexual harassment on the street, as have 98 percent of foreign visitors. Sixty-two percent of men admit to having sexually harassed women. Although there were few reported incidents of sexual harassment in the vast crowds that thronged Tahrir Square last year, the attacks resumed almost immediately after the government fell. On the night Mubarak stepped down, Lara Logan, a journalist for CBS, was sexually assaulted by a mob.

Under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which took power after Mubarak stepped down, military-led harassment of women became a part of the intimidation of the protesters, who had continued gathering throughout the year, calling for further reform. It is a tactic activists allege SCAF resurrected from Mubarak’s reign.

Last March, the army violently cleared a demonstration in Tahrir and detained at least 18 women. According to Amnesty International, male soldiers beat and strip-searched them. Seven said they were forcibly given “virginity tests.” One of the women, who filed a suit against the government, told the media that a male doctor had put his hand in her “chastity” for five minutes. The accused doctor was acquitted in March. In December, military police dispersing protesters dragged a woman across the asphalt, beating her and ripping her clothes to reveal her blue bra.