Egyptian women challenge harassment

Los Angeles Times

CAIRO, Egypt — She was leaving the bus when the driver touched her in a way a stranger shouldn’t.

“I screamed at him, ‘You’re an animal!’” said Shaimaa Abdel Rahman Aref, a 28-year-old graduate business student. “I felt as if he was striking at my pride. I wish he had beaten me instead. It would have been much less humiliating, especially that I was veiled and not wearing anything that would arouse a man.”

Aref took down the bus number and went to the police. But she found herself confronting a patriarchal society in which authorities are often indifferent to crimes against women and many families pressure their daughters and sisters to forgo justice rather than invite scandal.

Women such as Aref are beginning to challenge their abusers and force their nation to be more vigilant against sexual harassment.

In a landmark case in October, a man was sentenced to three years of hard labor for reaching out his truck window and groping Noha Rushdi Saleh, a documentary filmmaker. On one day last month, police arrested more than 300 teenagers on suspicion of harassing and flirting with women across Cairo; more than 50 youths were arrested this month.

A recent study by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights found that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in this country dependent on Western tourists experience public sexual harassment, including explicit comments, groping, men exposing themselves and assault.

Nearly 97 percent of Egyptian women and 87 percent of foreigners do not alert police.

Saleh refused to accept such treatment after her assailant reached out of his truck and groped her breast in June. The driver, Sherif Gomaa Gibrial, tried to escape, but Saleh jumped on the truck, which was then surrounded by neighbors. They grabbed Gibrial and told Saleh they’d beat him and send him on his way. But the 27-year-old former law school student wanted justice through the courts.