Sexual harassment hits Egypt
2007-11-03 09:31
Cairo - From lewd looks to inappropriate touching, experts say Egypt's growing street harassment of women is a deep-rooted and largely ignored problem shackling the country's progress.
Sexual harassment in public areas was not limited to a specific age category or social class, said the independent Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights (ECWR), which was spearheading a campaign against this "social cancer" in Egypt.
Nor does an outward expression of piety protect from sexual harassment, generally defined as "all unwelcome behaviour of a sexual nature, making women feel uncomfortable and unsafe".
Rasha Shaaban, 23, from the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, said: "As soon as I step onto the street, I am surrounded by sexual predators. I don't feel safe, the problem is getting worse. It has become so bad that I want to leave Egypt."
Woman 'deserves what she gets'
According to the state National Centre for Social and Criminal Research, sexual crimes were on the rise, but while they gave no official figures, ECWR said that two women were raped every hour in this country of 80 million and that 90% of offenders were jobless men.
There were many contributing factors to the increase in sexual harassment. Rising unemployment might push some men to display their machismo on the streets. The huge cost of marriage and the fact that sex outside marriage was forbidden might also explain the behaviour, experts said.
Engy Ghozlan, who ran the anti-harassment campaign at ECWR, said: "Men take out their frustration, not just sexual, against women."
But some men, who believed a woman's job was to look after the home, said that those out on the street were fair game.
Mohamed al-Sayyed, 32, who worked as an assistant at an upmarket hairdresser in Cairo, said: "When a woman walks out into the street in tight trousers and tight belts, she deserves what she gets.
"The women who come here are different from the ones in my village." Sayyed grew up in a village near Menya, in the conservative Egyptian south.
He said: "My female relatives would never be seen swaying in the street like this." He was defensively explaining the occasional wolf whistles "and more" he directed at Cairene women.
One sociologist, Dalal al-Bizri, saw a strong link between growing religious conservatism and sexual harassment.
She said that a puritan view of Islam brought over from religiously strict Saudi Arabia was partly responsible for the "culture of hate" against women.