Action-Oriented Responses to Sexual Harassment in Egypt

Abstract

Sexual harassment of women and girls in public places is prevalent and well-documented in Egypt. In a 2008 study of about 1,010 women and 1,010 men in Greater Cairo, 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women respondents reported they had been sexually harassed (Hassan, Abul Komsan, and Shoukry 2008, 16). A 2013 UN Women study revealed that 99 percent of 2,332 women sampled from seven governorates across rural and urban contexts, including Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailia, Gharbia, Dakahleya, Assiut, and Qena, had been sexually harassed (El-Deeb 2013, 6). Additionally, a 2014 study by HarassMap reported that 95 percent of three hundred women surveyed in Greater Cairo experienced sexual harassment (Fahmy et al. 2014, 6).Collective sexual assault and rape by largely unidentified men were prevalent responses to protests in Tahrir Square between 2011 and 2014 (El-Nadeem et al. 2013; Langohr 2013, 19; Nazra 2014). Such violence added to the existing widespread problem of everyday sexual harassment of women and girls by men and boys in public places, as well as sexual violence against women activists by actors affiliated with state security and police forces (Amar 2011, 309; Hafez 2014, 178; Tadros 2013, 8). In a context characterized by lax security due to the withdrawal of the police from the streets after the 2011 revolution (Ahmad Zaki and Abd Alhamid 2014; Tadros 2013, 7), novel forms of street-level action-oriented initiatives emerged and intensified. These initiatives focused on bystander intervention and self-defense and aimed at changing individual behaviors and attitudes, particularly as sexual assaults against activist and nonactivist women and girls became a regular feature of life. Initiatives against sexual harassment and assault such as HarassMap, OpAntiSH, Tahrir Bodyguard, WenDo Egypt, Shoft Taharrush, Dedd el-Taharrush, and Harakat Bassma relied on large numbers of volunteers and used social media for mobilization (Ahmad Zaki and Abd Alhamid 2014; Langohr 2013, 19; Langohr 2015, 131). Such action-oriented initiatives were facilitated by growing mainstream and social media attention to sexual harassment and violence and the ease of mobilizing creatively on- and offline to expose and shame harassers, name experiences of violence, and discuss them (Langohr 2015, 132).Between 2005 and 2010, in contrast, anti–sexual harassment interventions in Egypt by women’s and feminist nongovernmental organizations had focused largely on raising awareness and improving laws and policies, although there were early efforts at bottom-up approaches that used art, music, and theatrical events; workshops and trainings held at El Sawy Culture Wheel, the Goethe Institute, and the campus of the American University in Cairo (AUC); and interactive information sessions that included the collection of survey data to understand people’s experiences at AUC (Rizzo, Price, and Meyer 2012, 471–72; Pratt 2005, 141). The new initiatives against sexual harassment and assault represent for Hind Ahmad Zaki and Dalia Abd Alhamid (2014) the rise of “an independent social movement” that includes hundreds if not thousands of volunteers. Dalia Abd Alhamid, who works with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, emphasizes the “tremendous change” that occurred after the revolution as anti–sexual harassment activism moved away from small-scale “workshops, reports, documentation” that reached few people.1In addition to analyzing reports and secondary source material, this article uses fieldwork research we conducted in Cairo to explore the strategies and work of two prominent anti–sexual harassment initiatives, HarassMap, established in October 2010, and WenDo Egypt, established in May 2013.2 HarassMap activists mobilize bystanders to intervene if they witness sexual harassment, and WenDo Egypt trainers offer self-defense courses that encourage women to verbally and physically respond to harassment and assault against themselves and other women. We conducted participant observation and interviews with four activists in HarassMap and four trainers in Wendo Egypt. Participant observation included Abdelmonem working in the HarassMap office and attending unit meetings, trainings, and street outreach between 2013 and 2014. Galán participated in three self-defense workshops organized by WenDo Egypt in 2014 and 2015. We also interviewed six representatives of organizations and initiatives working against sexual harassment and assault, one each from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Nazra for Feminist Studies, El-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, Harakat Bassma, Dedd el-Taharrush, and Tahrir Bodyguard. All interviews were conducted in English.HarassMap was launched in October 2010 by going live with an online crowdmapping system, Ushahidi, a GIS-based technology that asks users to anonymously describe their sexual harassment experience and pinpoint the location of the incident on a Google map (Peuchaud 2014, i115, i118; Skalli 2014, 250).3 The HarassMap cofounders include Rebecca Chiao, a US citizen employed as international relations director between 2004 and 2008 at the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR); Engy Ghozlan, an Egyptian citizen who managed the ECWR anti–sexual harassment program in 2007 and 2008; Sawsan Gad, an independent Egyptian researcher who affiliated with ECWR in 2009; and Amel Fahmy, an Egyptian employee of the UN Population Fund from 2008 to 2011.In late 2008 Chiao and Ghozlan separately left ECWR because, as they report, they each sought other work opportunities and increasingly disagreed with the organization’s political advocacy approach in response to sexual harassment. In 2005 ECWR initiated the “Making Our Streets Safe for Everyone” project to combat sexual harassment. Initially, the initiative centered on bottom-up strategies that engaged local people to raise awareness of sexual harassment as a problem. It was not externally funded and was run by Chiao and unpaid interns and volunteers until 2007, at which point it received a grant from the UN Population Fund (Rizzo, Price, and Myer 2012, 470). With funding, Chiao contends that ECWR moved toward top-down projects, such as conducting research and promoting draft legal amendments to criminalize sexual harassment in Egypt (ECWR 2009; FIDH et al. 2014, 74).4 Within Egypt’s militarized and neoliberal environment, ECWR and other NGOs sought to combat sexual harassment without breaching a variety of legal restrictions on their activities, including the 1958 Emergency Law and Law 84 of 2002, regulating NGOs (Rizzo, Price, and Meyer 2012, 464).HarassMap founders bypassed registration with the Ministry of Social Affairs, a practice that became widespread among anti–sexual harassment initiatives after the revolution.5 Initially, Chiao and Ghozlan worked part-time at other jobs while using their private cars and personal funds for the initiative and meeting with volunteers in cafés.6 They held the first outreach meeting with volunteers in December 2010, although the revolution accelerated their work as people began to speak more freely about sexual violence and the “barrier between people and the street” was removed.7 Amal ElMohandes of Nazra similarly reports that between 2011 and 2013 “public space was very open” and “very promising.”8 She continues: “everyone felt that they own the streets.” Between 2012 and 2013 HarassMap incubated with the capacity-building NGO Nahdat el-Mahrousa, which oversaw the use of funds from the Canadian-based International Development Research Center. HarassMap used these funds to hire staff to coordinate volunteers and pay for the use of a coworking space in Heliopolis. In 2015, given the government’s renewed enforcement of Law 84, HarassMap sought formal NGO status, which was approved in early spring 2016.HarassMap’s mission is to end the “social acceptability” of public sexual harassment and encourage people to stand up against it. Thus the primary focus of their work is to build community outreach teams comprising local people who speak to their neighbors and community kin to promote zero tolerance for sexual harassment and more recently to recruit schools, universities, small businesses, and corporations to become “role models” and devise internal measures—HarassMap calls these “escalation policies”—to manage sexual harassment claims. Initially, HarassMap activists hoped to use their Ushahidi-powered crowdmap to conduct community outreach in “hotspots” of sexual harassment. This idea was discarded soon after the first volunteer training in December 2010, when the cofounders decided that it made more sense to focus instead on the neighborhoods of their growing volunteer pool to more effectively impact the neighbors, friends, and family of participants.9HarassMap comprises several units. At the time this research was conducted, the Community Outreach unit worked with more than fourteen hundred volunteers in twenty-three governorates to coordinate monthly street campaigns. Within each governorate, HarassMap trains volunteers to become “community captains” who are responsible for building, training, and overseeing their own volunteer team to conduct a minimum of one or two outreach days per month to engage people and instill within them a sense of responsibility for solving the problem of sexual harassment and changing cultural sensibilities.10 The Safe Areas unit works with small businesses such as cafés, kiosks, and even taxis. The Safe Corporates unit works with companies such as Uber. The Safe Schools and Universities unit develops campus outreach teams. Additionally, the Marketing and Communications unit streamlines messaging, mediates media presence, and devises campaigns, while the Research unit manages the crowdmap, though this unit is currently being reformulated.Social movement theorists have long noted that social and political change depends on the mobilization of bystander publics, who have been described as “distal spectators” even if they are sympathetic (Snow, Zurcher, and Peters 1981, 31). Social movement actors often seek to sway bystanders to their cause and turn them into movement adherents to build a critical mass that will precipitate change (Benford and Snow 2000, 624). HarassMap seeks to end the bystander effect in relation to sexual harassment by convincing bystanders (al-nas illi waqifa), or those who “play stupid” (iʿmal ʿabit), to view it as a crime that is everyone’s responsibility to counteract. “Play stupid” appeared as a caption in a cartoon circulated on HarassMap’s (2013) Facebook page, showing a faceless woman on a crowded metro car being harassed while others ignored the situation. Bystanders, HarassMap activists argue, contribute to the social acceptability of sexual harassment.In a TedX (2012) talk, Chiao noted that bystanders use myths to excuse sexual harassment, for example by arguing that it happens only to foreign or unveiled women or that harassers are sexually frustrated because of delayed marriage. Referencing a 2007 political campaign poster of a lollipop covered with flies that encouraged women to veil to avoid sexual harassment, Chiao challenged this message, saying: “We believe that the only way that this problem will stop is if all the harassers stop harassing. And the only way they’ll stop is if we stop accepting these reasons. Stop ignoring, stop making excuses for them, and stop tolerating their behavior.” Like other activists, Chiao believes that men bystanders and harassers “actually interpret silence as welcoming.”11HarassMap’s Ebaʾa el-Tamimi argues that bystanders often consider harassers to be “cool” and believe that women want to be sexually harassed.12 To challenge common responses to sexual harassment, HarassMap launched a series of campaigns between 2012 and 2015, including “Byitḥarrash leh?” (“Why Does He Harass?”), “Mesh sakta” (“I Am Not Silent”), “Ṣaliḥha fi dimaghak” (“Get It Right”), “ʿAyyizin siyasa guwwa al-gamaʿa” (“We Want a Policy in the University”), “Di mesh muʿ aksa, da taḥarrush” (“It’s Not Flirtation, It’s Harassment”), and “Al-mutaḥarrish mugrim” (“The Harasser Is a Criminal”). El-Tamimi emphasizes that these campaigns either focus on or direct their message to bystanders:I’m not telling the harasser to stop harassing. I’m not telling him to “stop this long-term behavior that you’ve been doing all your life.” . . . I’m not even talking to him. I’m talking to people in the street who are generally passive and generally sit around and look at something happening, sometimes they even disagree with it. . . . The idea is to activate these people. You can do it on moral grounds, so you can go and do what the community mobilization guys do and talk to people and make eye contact and tell them this happens on your very street under your own nose and you don’t do anything about it.13In their fall 2013 biannual training workshop, called HarassMap Academy, activists conducted a performance activity in which they asked volunteers to compare how bystanders beat thieves and turn them into the police when a woman’s purse is stolen, whereas they are usually silent when a woman’s body or personal space is violated on the street. HarassMap seeks to “transfer the salience” of standing up to theft to standing up to sexual harassment (Von Atteveldt, Ruigrok, and Kliennijenhuis 2006, 2). As HarassMap’s former director of Community Outreach Hussein El-Shafei (2013) explained to volunteers in a training workshop held in Fayoum in October 2013, the initiative’s work depends on street awareness campaigns that gain people’s trust, transform their perceptions of sexual harassment, and obtain their agreement to speak up as witnesses in order to reshape the “social mentality” (al-ʿaqliyya al-igtimaʿiyya).The focus on bystanders and individual responsibility to stop harassment in a community avoids demonizing or alienating young lower-class men who are usually identified as harassers in popular discourse (Amar 2011, 317). This approach to combating gender-based violence has been criticized for shifting blame to bystanders, encouraging vigilantism, and endangering those who intervene (Elk and Devereaux 2014). These criticisms, however, do not address bystander approaches focused on producing social pressure that changes harassing behavior and creates new community norms, which is HarassMap’s goal.WenDo Egypt was established in May 2013 by Schirin Salem, a former gender project manager at the German Agency for International Cooperation. Being “half-Egyptian, half-German,” as she describes herself, influenced Salem’s decision to bring to Cairo WenDo, a women’s self-defense method created in Canada in the 1970s.14 “I have been coming to Egypt since my early childhood and always saw harassment,” notes Salem.15 She was surprised that her cousins and friends “never reacted” when harassed. Salem learned of WenDo when she attended a self-defense course as a thirteen-year-old in Germany. She recalls this experience as greatly increasing her self-confidence. Many years later she still remembered many self-defense techniques she learned. After she moved back to Egypt in the aftermath of the January 25 Revolution, she became certified as a WenDo trainer and decided to adapt this “Western concept” to the safety concerns of Egyptian women and girls.16 Salem trained weekly with a group of Egyptian women, practicing the exercises and modifying them to their needs and demands.WenDo self-defense training is addressed to women and girls of all ages, shapes, sizes, and abilities. It focuses on increasing women’s self-confidence and assertiveness in public places and on teaching women how to react against everyday sexual harassment through a wide range of strategies. The goal is to increase the number of women who walk confidently on the streets and react effectively and assertively to stop sexual harassment. Salem emphasizes that WenDo Egypt allows her to “see an effect right after” a training instead of waiting years for change.17WenDo Egypt basic training includes ten hours divided into two blocks. In the first, women learn how to enforce their boundaries through the look, voice, and body language. In the second block, they practice easy-to-perform kicks and punches that target vulnerable areas of a man’s anatomy. Since 2014 Salem has trained twenty-six new instructors from Cairo and Mansoura. WenDo trainers offer private self-defense courses to Egyptian and foreign women who can afford the lessons, which cost two hundred Egyptian pounds (about twenty-two US dollars), but they also train underprivileged women and girls on a voluntary basis in collaboration with children’s organizations, refugee service centers, and youth centers. Salem reported that by May 2015 around a thousand women and girls had been trained by WenDo Egypt, about seven hundred of them for free.18 Additionally, WenDo Egypt co-organized four igmadi (“be strong”) events, which combine self-defense, Zumba classes and awareness-raising sessions in cooperation with HarassMap, Nazra, and El-Nadeem. These events were attended by an average of 325 women and girls.19 Beginning in May 2015, WenDo courses are offered in youth centers across the country and new Training of Trainers courses have been planned in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Youth and Sports and the German Agency for International Cooperation, which provide funding to WenDo Egypt.Feminist scholarship on self-defense has demonstrated that norms of respectable femininity prescribe passive, helpless, compliant female bodies in need of male or state protection (De Welde 2003, 256; McCaughey 1997, 37). In public places, this gendered socialization often translates into heightened fear of rape and anxiety (Gardner 1990, 311; McDaniel 1993, 44; Riger and Gordon 1981, 71). Several studies of sexual harassment in Egypt reveal that women rarely respond to everyday catcalling and ogling for fear of escalating the situation into physical attack (Fahmy et al. 2014, 48; Hassan, Abul Komsan, and Shoukry 2008, 19). Instead, they may avoid public places, dress more conservatively, and abstain from smiling or making eye contact with strangers (Fahmy et al. 2014, 47).WenDo trainer Miriam notes that women “know that if they look at someone they may get a remark . . . so they try to disappear by looking down.”20 Yet this strategy of “fictive invisibility” (Ardener 1981, 21; Ilahi 2008, 74) communicates weakness while limiting women’s visual scope and awareness of potential dangers. WenDo Egypt trainers, in contrast, recommend that women look up when walking on the street and, if harassed, stare back at the harasser directly into his eyes. In the WenDo classroom, participants are lined up in pairs and asked to stare at each other in a “threatening” way, an exercise that inevitably raises nervous giggles as trainees struggle to maintain the stare. Other exercises are designed to unlearn other “feminine” habits and develop a strong look, loud voice, and convincing posture. Particularly at the beginning of a training, participants feel uncomfortable saying no or raising their voice. “It is weird to be so loud,” notes one of the trainees after an exercise. When some participants complain that shouting is “tiring” or “hurts [their] throat,” WenDo trainers emphasize the importance of using the voice to send a clear message and ask for help.Creating a women-only safe space is central to the WenDo concept. Participants share their experiences of harassment without fear they will be blamed for sexual advances. They learn to develop a critical consciousness together.21 In addition to the look, voice, and body language exercises, the physical aspects of the WenDo training are devised to increase women’s self-confidence on the streets. WenDo trainer Fatma Atef emphasizes that most women only need to use the voice, look, and mental self-confidence aspects of the training to protect themselves. Nevertheless, it is very important to “know some physical self-defense techniques, [to] go out from the training knowing that . . . she can punch in the face whenever it gets really physical.”22Participants put such skills into practice in role-plays that re-create situations of harassment while waiting for a cab, walking on the street, or sitting in the bus. Trainers consider this one of the most challenging exercises because participants may relive traumatic experiences and feel unable to solve them on their own. Participation is voluntary and some trainees prefer to watch others handle their situation before they participate. The harassed woman in a role-play scenario can freeze the situation and ask for assistance at any point. The trainer often asks observers of the role-play “what was good” and “what could be done better” in order to elicit peer feedback and positive reinforcement.23 With support, all participants manage to stop the harasser, who is played by the trainer. This is “a very powerful moment . . . that changes something inside them, because most of them are very relieved to get out of the situation, and very happy, and very proud of themselves.”24At the end of the two-day basic training, participants break a wooden board with their bare hands, using one of the strikes learned during the course. This final exercise involves more will than force and serves as a rite of passage that signifies the overcoming of fear, which is materialized in the broken wood that trainees may decorate with color markers and take home as a reminder of their mental and physical strength.25 Salem contends that WenDo contributes to the transformation of entrenched social beliefs that make sexual harassment acceptable by encouraging women to react against these sexual intrusions and support other women who challenge sexual harassment on the streets.26In 2008 sixteen Egyptian nongovernmental organizations formed the Task Force Against Sexual Violence to, among other matters, demand that sexual harassment be considered a penal offense. The Task Force also called for the amendment of Articles 267 and 268 in the penal code because the first limits the definition of rape to penetration of a vagina by a penis and the second refers to sexual assault as a “violation of honor” (Reza 2011, 198).27 These efforts, which included submitting article drafts to legislative and executive bodies, continued after the January 25 Revolution but have been ignored by the government (FIDH et al. 2014, 67–73). Farah Shash, a counselor at El-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, emphasizes the necessity of changing current legal definitions, which do not consider forced penetration by objects other than a penis to be rape, forced anal penetration as rape, or men as victims of rape.28In September 2013, under the interim government of Adly Mansour, the Ministry of Interior (which supervises the police forces) activated a unit responsible for monitoring violence against women. On June 5, 2014, after a sexual harassment incident at Cairo University led to a public outcry in March of the same year (Mada Masr2014), Mansour issued Decree 50 to amend Article 306 of the penal code (“the scandalous breach of modesty”) so that verbal, behavioral, phone, and online sexual harassment would be crimes with prison sentences of between six months and five years and fines of up to fifty thousand Egyptian pounds (US Library of Congress 2014). Activists argue the decree is insufficient because it requires demonstrating that an attacker intended to gain a sexual benefit, which is difficult to prove and depends on a judge’s discretion (Nazra 2014).29 In addition, survivors have no confidentiality because contact information is included in police reports, accessible to the lawyer of the defendant and often published in news articles. As a result, the family of the defendant will often find the woman who brings the claim and “either threaten her or emotionally blackmail her” so that most drop their case.30 Nevertheless, the state criminalized sexual harassment in response to “tremendous pressure” from below.31HarassMap’s el-Shafei cynically notes that sexual harassment is the “favorite social cause” of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (inaugurated June 8, 2014) as indicated by a series of measures adopted by the Egyptian government between 2014 and 2015.32 In October 2014 the Ministry of Interior deployed a new anti–sexual harassment women’s police force during the ʿEid Al Adha festivities (Hassanein 2014). However, this unit has been criticized by anti–sexual harassment activists for being ineffective against sexual harassers and leading instead to increased policing and detention of their volunteers (Mada Masr2015). In early 2015 el-Sisi mandated that all Egyptian ministries implement anti–sexual harassment training workshops for staff.33 El-Shafei, who coauthored the training manual for the Ministry of Youth and Sports implemented in March 2015, was pessimistic about the effectiveness of such trainings given the ministry’s censorship of information on gender norms and the increasingly restrictive political environment. Activists such as Abd Alhamid similarly contend that the government adopts “cosmetic changes” but does not “really have the political will to fight sexual violence” or make substantive reforms to improve women’s lives.34As scholars have widely discussed, legal and policy interventions do not necessarily transform gendered beliefs and practices and can even activate implicit gender bias or engender resistance when sociocultural norms are not undermined (Merry 1996, 62–63; Tinkler 2013, 1269). While women will often use laws strategically, the laws position women as victims who require courts to save them. They also constitute men as criminals, discouraging men and women from turning to the law (Merry 1996, 69; Tinkler 2013, 1271). The anti–sexual harassment initiatives that emerged after the revolution favor direct intervention on the streets as more effective than legal and political change strategies for challenging gendered norms and practices, although activists also encourage women to seek redress through courts and policy. HarassMap activists Chiao and El-Shafei argue that people who do not respect the law or political system will simply seek creative ways to evade being caught when committing a crime.35 For WenDo Egypt’s founder Salem, the amendment of the penal code is a step in the right direction but requires “a behavioral change” so that “people implement the law” and consider “sexual harassment as a crime.”36In this article we use the term action-oriented to express activists’ urge to organize against sexual violence after the revolution. Reflecting on the founding of Dedd el-Taharrush in 2012 to combat sexual harassment during the ʿEid holidays, Ayman Nagy states: “I had this intention that I need to do something and I said alright, let’s do something, let’s just create an event, that was the initial thought.”37 Nihal Zaghloul notes in relation to establishing Harakat Bassma with Abdelfatah Mahmoud that “he had absolutely no tools, nothing. . . . He had an idea and wanted to throw it [out there] and I had a stand I needed to make.”38 WenDo trainer and HarassMap Safe Areas coordinator Kamilia El-Kady reports that her participation was motivated by a sexual harassment incident suffered by a family member.39 The desire for an immediate response reflects what Mary Awadallah from Tahrir Bodyguard calls a “proactive” approach that centers on people’s personal experiences in conjunction with the revolution.40Action-oriented anti–sexual harassment initiatives were restricted when the military overthrew the government on July 3, 2013, imposed a curfew, and reestablished the Emergency Law between August and November 2013. In November 2013 the Adly government imposed Law 107, criminalizing free assembly and public expression (US Library of Congress 2013). Intervention teams that had been operating in Tahrir Square between 2012 and 2013 ceased their activities because of political conviction in some cases and security concerns in others. In November 2014 the government, led by President el-Sisi, required anti–sexual harassment initiatives to register as nongovernmental organizations under Law 84 of 2002 or risk arrest of their members.41Since the January 25 Revolution in Egypt, multiple volunteer-based initiatives were organized or accelerated to combat public sexual violence through on-the-ground action. HarassMap and WenDo activists argue that people must produce the changes they demand in government and society. HarassMap activists maintain that sexual harassment will only end when all people speak up and no longer view it as acceptable. WenDo trainers contend that self-defense is an effective form of anti–sexual harassment activism that can bring societal change when all women react against sexual intrusions and support each other in this endeavor. Both initiatives promote gender equality and women’s presence in public places, working to create new social ethics with the goal of producing lasting change.