CAIRO — The sheer number of women sexually abused and gang raped in a single
public square had become too big to ignore. Conservative Islamists in Egypt’s new political elite
were outraged — at the women.
“Sometimes,” said Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a police
general, lawmaker and ultraconservative Islamist, “a girl contributes 100
percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions.”
The increase in sexual assaults over the last two years
has set off a new battle over who is to blame, and the debate has become a
stark and painful illustration of the convulsions racking Egypt as it tries to
reinvent itself.
Under President Hosni Mubarak, the omnipresent police
kept sexual assault out of the public squares and the public eye. But since Mr.
Mubarak’s exit in 2011, the withdrawal of the security forces has allowed
sexual assault to explode into the open, terrorizing Egyptian women.
Women, though, have also taken advantage of another
aspect of the breakdown in authority — by speaking out through the newly
aggressive news media, defying social taboos to demand attention for a problem
the old government often denied. At the same time, some Islamist elected
officials have used their new positions to vent some of the most patriarchal
impulses in Egypt’s traditional culture and a deep hostility to women’s
participation in politics.
The female victims, these officials declared, had
invited the attacks by participating in public protests. “How do they ask the
Ministry of Interior to protect a woman when she stands among men?” Reda Saleh
Al al-Hefnawi, a lawmaker from the Muslim Brotherhood’s
political party, asked at a parliamentary meeting on the issue.
The revolution initially promised to reopen public
space to women. Men and women demonstrated together in Tahrir Square peacefully
during the heady 18 days and nights that led to the ouster of Mr. Mubarak. But
within minutes of his departure the threat re-emerged in a group attack on the
CBS News correspondent Lara Logan. There are no official statistics on women
attacked — partly because few women report offenses — but all acknowledge that
the attacks have grown bolder and more violent.
By the second anniversary of the revolution, on Jan.
25, the symbolic core of the revolution — Tahrir Square — had become a no-go
zone for women, especially after dark.
During a demonstration that day against the new
Islamist-led government, an extraordinary wave of sexual assaults — at least 18
confirmed by human rights groups, and more, according to Egypt’s semiofficial
National Council of Women — shocked the country, drawing public attention from
President Mohamed Morsi and Western
diplomats.
Hania Moheeb, 42, a journalist, was one of the first
victims to speak out about her experience that day. In a television interview,
she recounted how a group of men had surrounded her, stripped off her clothes
and violated her for three quarters of an hour. The men all shouted that they
were trying to rescue her, Ms. Moheeb recalled, and by the time an ambulance
arrived she could no longer differentiate her assailants from defenders.
To alleviate the social stigma usually attached to
sexual assault victims in Egypt’s conservative culture, her husband, Dr. Sherif
Al Kerdani, appeared alongside her.
“My wife did nothing wrong,” Dr. Kerdani said.
In the 18 confirmed attacks that day, six women were
hospitalized, according to interviews conducted by human rights groups. One
woman was stabbed in her genitals, and another required a hysterectomy.
In the aftermath, victims of other sexual assaults
around Tahrir Square over the last two years have come forward as well. “When I
see Mohamed Mahmoud Street on television from home, my hand automatically grabs
my pants,” Yasmine Al Baramawy said in a television interview, recalling her
own attack last November.
She and a friend were each surrounded by two separate
rings of attackers, she said. Some claimed to be protecting her from others but
joined in the attack. They used knives to cut most of the clothes off her body
and then pinned her half-naked to the hood of a car. And they continued to
torment her on a slow, hourlong drive to a nearby neighborhood, where, she
said, residents finally interceded to rescue her.
“They told people I had a bomb on my abdomen to stop
anybody from rescuing me,” Ms. Baramawy said.
The attacks have underscored the failure of the Morsi
government, with its links to the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, to
restore social order. The comments by the president’s Islamist allies blaming
the women have proved embarrassing.
Pakinam el-Sharkawy, the president’s political adviser
and the highest-ranking woman in his administration, called such statements
“completely unacceptable.”
She attributed the attacks to the general breakdown in
security but also to the refusal of the protesters to allow the police into the
square since the revolt against Mr. Mubarak. “The protesters insist on keeping security
out of the square, even to regulate traffic,” she said.
On Sunday, the Morsi government convened a meeting of
women to discuss plans for their advancement. So far, though, its most tangible
measure to address the problem is draft legislation to criminalize sexual
harassment.
But women’s rights advocates say the bill would do
nothing to protect women from social attitudes and scorn that assault victims
face in hospitals and police stations — not to mention in the Parliament — if
they try to bring legal complaints.
Ms. Moheeb said in an interview that after she was
attacked, nurses told her to keep silent in order to protect her reputation.
With police protection negligible, some women are
taking their security into their own hands. At a recent march to call attention
to the sexual attacks, several women held knives above their heads. “Don’t
worry about me,” said Abeer Haridi, 40, a lawyer. “I’m armed.”
Members of the political elite, meanwhile, have
appeared more concerned with blaming one another. The Muslim Brotherhood
“plotted the sexual harassment in Tahrir Square” to intimidate the
demonstrators, asserted Mohamed Abu Al Ghar, the president of the Egyptian
Social Democratic Party.
The Muslim Brotherhood said opposition leaders “ignored
the brutal party of harassment and rape” in the square, according to a column
on the Brotherhood Web site. The rapes are “a disgrace on their foreheads,” the
column declared.
Other Brotherhood lawmakers faulted protest organizers
for failing to segregate the demonstrators by gender as the Islamists usually
do.
Some ultraconservative Islamists, now a political power
alongside the Brotherhood, condemned the women for speaking out at all.
“You see those women speaking like ogres, without
shame, politeness, fear or even femininity,” declared a television preacher,
Ahmed Abdullah, known as Sheik Abu Islam.
Such a woman is “like a demon,” he said, wondering why
anyone should sympathize with those “naked” women who “went there to get
raped.”
Ms. Moheeb called such remarks “scandalous” and accused
Islamist lawmakers of being complicit.
“When ordinary people say such things, ignorance might be an excuse,” Ms. Moheeb said, “but when somebody in the legislature makes such comments, they’re encouraging the assailants.”