Mass sexual assault in Egypt

Local terminology

Harassment is known in Egypt as taharrush (تحرش). Sexual harassment is taharrush jinsi (تحرش جنسي), a term in use since at least the 1950s, according to the political scientist As'ad AbuKhalil. During a training session in Cairo in 2012, an anti-harassment group discussed 14 forms of taharrush, including "group or mass taḥarrush" (التحرش الجنسي الجماعى), or taharrush jamai.

Background

Sexual harassment was barely discussed in Egypt before 2006. The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights sought to draw attention to it, but the public's response was that it was an American idea wrongly applied to Egyptian society.

Mass sexual assault was first documented during the Egyptian constitutional referendum on 25 May 2005, on what became known as "Black Wednesday," when women demonstrators were sexually assaulted by a group of agents provocateurs, groups of men who had arrived on buses, as police watched and did nothing to intervene.

The issue attracted more discussion following the Eid al-Fitr holiday in 2006, when on 24 October a crowd of young men who had been denied entry to a cinema in Cairo engaged in a five-hour-long mass sexual assault of women in Talaat Harb Street. Police were reported to have done nothing to stop it, although many bystanders tried to help the women.

The attacks gained prominence outside Egypt in February 2011 when Lara Logan, a correspondent for the American network CBS, was sexually assaulted by hundreds of men in Tahrir Square, Cairo, while reporting on the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. By 2012, according to Al Akhbar, such attacks had become a "prominent feature" of religious festivals in Egypt.

Attacks

According to Amnesty International, the attacks last from a few minutes to over an hour. Women who have described attacks in or near Tahrir Square say the men are usually in their 20s and 30s. Victims have been aged seven to 70.

Separated from her friends by the crowd, or out alone, the woman finds herself encircled by a large group of men who grope her breasts, genitals and buttocks. Attempts are made to pull or cut her clothes off, and her body is pulled in different directions as men move her through the crowd. Women regularly report digital penetration of the vagina and anus. Attackers have used sticks, knives and blades, and in several cases sharp objects have been inserted into the victim's vagina.

One student protester described how a group of men formed a ring around her in Tahrir Square on 25 January 2013:

The last thing I heard was "don't worry," followed by screaming ... At first they tried to rip my bag out of my hands; I then felt hands all over my body, tearing down my trousers and long jacket; they were undoing its clips. ... They pulled my trousers and pants down, but couldn’t get them all the way down because I was wearing boots that they couldn’t manage to get off ... I felt hands touch me from all directions, and I was moved, almost carried, inside the circle as people continued saying: "don’t worry." They were saying that while violating me ...

Perpetrators regularly claim to be helping the women when in fact they are attacking them, which increases the difficulty for rescuers and leaves the women not knowing who to trust. Women testify to having heard attackers say: "Do not be afraid; I'm protecting you," or "you are like my sister, do not be afraid." People genuinely trying to help find themselves being beaten and sexually assaulted too.

Volunteer groups in Cairo, including OpAntiSH (Operation Anti Sexual Harassment), organize "extraction teams" who push into the circles wearing padded clothing, helmets and gloves, and get the women out. Other OpAntiSH teams carry spare clothes and medical supplies, operate a hotline so that the extraction teams know where to go, and offer counselling and legal and medical help. They were called to 19 incidents on 25 January 2013 alone, and were able to respond to 15 of them.

Rescuers have described how assailants have set up makeshift tea stands in the crowd; in one case boiling water from a tea stand was thrown over rescuers who had formed a protective ring around a woman. During an attack in Cairo in 2013, the attackers allowed an ambulance to reach the woman only when the driver told them she was dead.

Reasons

According to Mariz Tadros of the Institute of Development Studies, the men's motives include pleasure, a desire to dominate women, and a "perceived sense of sexual deprivation" because marriage may be financially prohibitive. Journalist Shereen El Feki, author of Sex and the Citadel (2013), writing about sexual harassment in general (taharrush jinsi), blamed unemployment, social media and a "breakdown of family surveillance" because of overworked parents.

In one survey 60 percent of the highest educated women in Egypt blamed the victims (of general sexual harassment) and "provocative" clothing, as did 75 percent of the least educated women.

In a 2013 UN survey, 75.7% of women who had been sexually harassed said it occurred while they were wearing conservative clothing without makeup. When asked about causes, female respondents cited "foreign pornographic programs" (97.2%), "non-enforcement of the religious principles" (95.5%) and "non-compliance of girls with religious values with regard to appearance" (94.3%). Male respondents cited "wearing tight clothes" (96.3%) and that the women "do not conform to religious ethics with regard to their appearance" (97.5%).

Nehad Abu Komsan, head of the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, argues that sexual harassment is a symptom of the country's political and economic oppression, and that men are "lashing out at those next down the line in the patriarchy." Hussein el Shafie of OpAntiSH has argued that the attacks are like a "tear-gas bomb" to get women off the streets – not sexual but stemming from a sense of entitlement. According to a 2013 paper by Nazra for Feminist Studies:

[A] general attitude of sexual entitlement prevails, that is, a belief that the bodies of women present in the context of demonstrations are safe territories for sexual attacks underlies nearly all testimonies. With testimonies that speak of hundreds of hands persistently raping women, with hundreds more watching the brutal attacks, some while even smiling, it becomes clear that we are faced with an overwhelming challenge, namely a state and a society that have internalized sexual violence against women as the law of the land.

Prevalence

According to a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, 83% of Egyptian women said they had experienced sexual harassment, as did 98% of women from overseas while in Egypt. A 2013 study in Egypt by UN Women found that 99.3% of female respondents said they had been sexually harassed.

The first jail sentence in Egypt for sexual harassment came in 2008 after a man molested a woman in the street from his car. Following this, two films – Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (Yousry Nasrallah, 2009) and 678 (Muhammad Diyab, 2010) – brought the issue of taharrush to cinemas.

The mass sexual assaults have been on the increase since the fall of Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011, the end of the 2011 revolution, particularly during protests in Tahrir Square and religious festivals.

According to Serena Hollmeyer Taylor and other researchers at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the revolution saw a drop in complaints of harassment. Citing HARASSmap, which offers an interactive mapping service to which harassment can be reported, they write that 82 reports of sexual harassment were received between 7 and 25 January 2011. This is in contrast with the eight received between 25 January, the day of the first protests, and 11 February, when Mubarak stepped down. Taylor et al. call this Egypt's "liminal moment," following the anthropologist Victor Turner's idea that, during political upheaval, people are liberated from their "cultural script." During those 18 days, a protester told them, men put aside their differences with women, and everyone was simply Egyptian.

After the fall of Mubarak, there was rapid escalation, beginning with the attacks, on the night he stepped down, on Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy and South African journalist Lara Logan. Logan, a correspondent for CBS, was sexually assaulted for 30 minutes by around 200 men in Tahrir Square before being rescued by a group of Egyptian women and soldiers. Several more journalists were among the hundreds of women who experienced mass sexual assault over the following few years: French journalist Caroline Sinz in November 2011; British journalist Natasha Smith in June 2012; Egyptian journalist Hania Moheeb on 25 January 2013, along with 18 other women; and a Dutch journalist in June 2013.

Five hundred cases of mass sexual assault were documented between June 2012 and June 2014. An anti-harassment group, I Saw Harassment, reported four cases on 8 June 2014 alone, during President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's inaugural celebrations, while Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment reported ten. The New York Times wrote of the celebrations:

At times, the prevalence of sexual violence in the crowds was hard even for the official state television network to hide. Female screams interrupted the broadcast of a nationalistic poet reciting from a stage ... when the screams grew louder, another man seized the microphone, yelling: 'Young men, please move away from the girls! Men, young men, get back!'"

Video evidence

From 2011 onwards, footage of women being assaulted began to appear regularly on social media, including one of a woman in Alexandria in 2011 being dragged along the ground and hoisted onto men's shoulders.

The Girl in the Blue Bra video (Sit al Banat) in December 2011 showed a woman partially covered by an abaya being beaten, stomped on and dragged around by the military in Tahrir Square. A man is similarly attacked during the same video. Thousands of women took to the streets to protest.

A video taken on 8 June 2014, also in Tahrir Square, showed a naked woman being sexually assaulted during inaugural celebrations for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. A volunteer for I Saw Harassment said hundreds of people were grabbing at the woman and that it took the police 20 minutes to get her out of the crowd. Seven men aged 15–49 were arrested. After the president visited the woman in hospital, the Egyptian government asked YouTube to remove the video; a spokesman said the request had come from the woman. YouTube responded by removing copies in which the victim could be identified.

Counter-movement

The period saw the growth of a counter-movement of NGOs and women's groups. After the particularly high number of assaults on 25 January 2013, women met that night at Café Riche on Talaat Harb Street, near Tahrir Square, and decided to start telling their stories. Journalist and broadcaster Lamis Elhadidy devoted an entire programme to the assaults and apologized for not having covered them sooner.

A first attempt to change the law, supported by Amr Hamzawy, failed. The ruling party maintained that women participating in rallies were personally responsible for such incidents.

In March 2013 the Muslim Brotherhood opposed the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, arguing that it would lead to the "disintegration of society." The law was changed after a female law student at the Cairo University College of Law was sexually assaulted by a large group of men on campus in March 2014, and had to be escorted to safety by security guards.

Comparisons to attacks outside Egypt

The attacks in Egypt, and the term taharrush ("harassment" in Arabic), came to wider attention in 2016 when women in Europe reported having been sexually assaulted by groups of North African men during New Year's Eve celebrations. German police compared the attacks to the mass sexual assaults in Egypt.

Most of the attacks took place in Cologne, Germany, where 359 women filed sexual-assault complaints. Women also filed complaints in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart; Salzburg, Austria; Helsinki, Finland; Kalmar and Malmö, Sweden; and Zurich, Switzerland. The news coverage prompted a leak to a Swedish newspaper that similar attacks had taken place in Stockholm in 2014 and 2015 during We Are Sthlm, a music festival for teenagers. The attacks were not publicized at the time for fear of stirring up racism.

According to a German local government report, the German federal police compared the attacks to "taharrush gamea (collective sexual harassment in crowds)," a practice they said existed in Arab countries, as reported by the media during the Egyptian revolution. The transliteration, taharrush gamea, followed the Egyptian pronunciation, taḥarrush gamāʿī (with a hard ⟨g⟩), rather than the standard pronunciation, taḥarrush jamāʿī. An article in Die Welt on 10 January 2016, headlined "The phenomenon 'taharrush gamea' has arrived in Germany," made international news.

The events sparked a debate about sexism, racism and the European migrant crisis. Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, wrote that "acculturation into the strict sex codes of the West takes years." Dan Hitchens argued in the Spectator that mass sexual assault was a feature of Egypt, rather than of the Arab world, and that linking it to the attacks in Europe was "over-excited." Algerian writer Kamel Daoud linked the attacks in Germany to "the sexual misery of the Arab world" in a controversial op-ed of the New York Times dated 14 February 2016.