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Egypt – Women Activists, By Groups & Campaigns, Raise Awareness of Women’s Issues in Post-Revolution Egypt
EGYPT – WOMEN ACTIVISTS THROUGH GROUPS & CAMPAIGNS,
RAISE AWARENESS OF WOMEN’S ISSUES IN POST-REVOLUTION EGYPT
A group of women take part in a workshop
organized by Nazra, an Egyptian feminist organization that works to support
female activists in their fight against sexual harassment and for gender
equality, Nov. 11, 2013. (photo by Facebook.com/Nazra for Feminist
Studies)
Author: Florence Massena - September 17,
2015
In 2012, international media talked
about collective rapes targeting women
in the protests in Tahrir Square for the first time. In reaction, several civil
groups, such as Tahrir Bodyguard, OpAntiSH and Basma, were created to protect women and
establish actions to prevent rape during the protests. Three years later,
they had to change their way of action, from emergency to sustainability, with
more or less success.
The Egyptian revolution, from 2011 to 2014,
seems to have brought together and strengthened civil initiatives against
sexual harassment and for gender equality. “The feminist group called Nazra
exists since 2005, and was working mainly on helping women to represent
themselves in the 2010 parliamentary elections.
But it became more active in 2011 as women started to be more involved in the
public sphere,” Mahy Hassan, who is in charge of the Women Human Rights
Defender Program in Nazra, told Al-Monitor.
“So we started a program based on human
rights, gender and feminism, as well as coordinating with other anti-harassment
groups to provide medical and legal assistance to the women who have been raped
during protests,” she said.
Nazra activists documented around 500 sexual assaults and rapes
— which were kept anonymous — in downtown Cairo between 2012 and 2014, and
initiated a “feminist school” in 2013
and a 10-day workshop for the public and activists to learn about feminism,
gender, stereotypes and violence.
“All of this was made possible because more
people got involved in these issues during the revolution,” Hassan said. She
added, “We had a bigger team and started more programs, and I don't feel that
motivation has decreased since then.”
One of the groups created in 2012 that Nazra
was coordinating with is OpAntiSH, Operation Anti-Sexual
Harassment/Assault. In November 2012, a group of young people — both
politicized internationals and Egyptians who participated in the revolution —
started activities of direct intervention to get victims of aggression out of
the crowd at Tahrir Square.
“We would take them [women] to safe
places close to the square thanks to friends making their apartment
available to us, and bring them to their friends or family, and sometimes to
the hospital if necessary,” Leslie Piquemal, in charge of logistics at OpAntiSH,
told Al-Monitor.
Piquemal added, “Some women tried to file
complaints at police stations in 2013, but no trial was successful. The police
is not trained to deal with this kind of situation, so most victims don't even
try.”
With the end of the protests a few weeks
after Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s electoral
victory in June 2014, the group didn't need to intervene in protests
anymore, so it became gradually inactive.
“It was hard to keep in touch with all the
volunteers. Around 300 people participated [in our activities] for two years,
and the 2013 policies restricting
the registration of associations to avoid the creation of Muslim Brotherhood
organizations made it very hard for us to gather. In 2014, a lot of people got arrested, not
only Muslim Brotherhood [members], and activists were just exhausted. The
police came back to Tahrir Square [after Sisi’s election]; there was a lot
of violence and clashes in the
streets, so it was impossible to keep going,” Piquemal said.
With new security threats and the
breathlessness of the revolution in Egypt, the activists never got to move to
new kinds of activities. She added, “We got together in a time of emergency,
and our friends were getting raped. But after working so hard for two years, I
guess it became too hard to convert ourselves to an awareness group; we were
not specialized in that matter.”
Launched at the same time as OpAntiSH and
Tahrir Bodyguard, Basma also started out as an emergency action group to
protect women in crowds, but managed to evolve with around 10 permanent members
working full time to develop new and sustainable activities of anti-harassment
and female political representation.
“We started reading and analyzing gender and
social issues to help create a safe space for everyone,” Nihal Saad Zaghloul,
one of the founders of Basma, told Al-Monitor.
She said, “Revolution makes you feel you want
to do more to change this unfair system; we channeled our anger for a
positive change. Of course some lost motivation so we separated from 40 people
in the process, but we still have many volunteers we work with."
Basma decided to focus on awareness about sexual harassment through campaigns
targeting universities across Egypt, as well as a program called “Safe cities
project,” training local people from targeted cities to know more about sexual
harassment and be able to talk to people about it.
The group also works with the government
through the Ministry of Youth, which gathered feminist organizations
to organize a clear plan to fight the issue, “but it was not really efficient,”
Mohanad Sangary, Basma’s communications officer, told Al-Monitor.
“We also kept patrolling in the metro and in
the streets, but it's more of a way of approaching and sensitizing people to
the issue than fixing it," he said. He added, "For now, we don't want
to expand at a big level because it is not sustainable, so we make calculated
moves."
Slow but steady, the Basma organization tries
to be more efficient “through baby steps, because we think that education to
gender-biased issues is the only way for a long-term solution,” Zaghloul
insisted.
The focus these groups had on sexual
harassment seems to have pushed younger people to involve themselves in
different ways to change the social system, such as the Students'
Scientific Society, Cairo’s local branch of the International
Federation of Medical Students' Association. Through Cairo’s medical
university campus at Cairo University, students established an anti-sexual
harassment unit supervised by the president of the university in 2015.
“The aim of our project was to raise
awareness about the types of sexual harassment, what is
harassment and how to report an incident,” Nourane Aref Khoweiled, the local
officer of sexual and reproductive health at Cairo University, told Al-Monitor.
“On campus, we are trying to cover all
aspects of the topic and announcing that we are here to help students report
any incident and assure that the university will carry out an investigation and
take adequate actions, while reassuring victims that the process is
confidential, even if the harassers are their professors,” Khoweiled said.
Before launching the campaign, the unit
received special training with HarassMap, which encourages
people to report cases of harassment
in the streets through mobile applications and a hotline, therefore building a
map showing areas with different rates of incidents and then training people in
this area to fight against harassment.
“Throughout our training session, we
concluded that it’s really hard to know what is the actual cause of such a
disturbing phenomenon, but it’s unacceptable and inexcusable under any
circumstances,” Khoweiled insisted. She added, “And whatever the reason, we
should take action and help limit it.”
As young people like Khoweiled started their own initiatives and leftist feminist organizations developed their own actions, the future seems brighter for Egyptian women. A law against harassment was even launched in June 2014, but it is still too soon to determine the effect it will have on a long-term perspective.