Tiskane izdaje
Before Warda enters an elevator these days, she makes sure at least one other woman is with her. On January 16, Warda was nearly raped. It happened in early afternoon, in the heart of central Cairo, in an elevator.
A man with short black hair entered, Warda recalled. "We didn't really look at each other; I was reading some messages on my phone," she said. The elevator, big enough for four people, stopped suddenly, and the lights went out. The electricity was cut, nothing unusual in some neighborhoods of Cairo. They called for the bawab - the caretaker - but no one answered.
"Then I felt the hand of the man in my pants. I asked him to stop, but he said I better shut up or he would take his knives out," she said, fighting back tears. He opened his pants and pressed himself against her for what felt like hours, she said. Luckily, the lights came back on. "He stopped and let go of me. I just didn't want to look into his face."
The elevator returned to the ground floor. He left, not rushing, and greeted the bawab.
Warda, who asked that her full name be withheld, never reported the incident. In Egypt, hundreds of thousands of women are everyday victims of sexual harassment. Most keep quiet; they don't want to risk blame or humiliation.
"If we talk about verbal harassment, then that is something that basically every woman is undergoing in Egypt," said Heba Morayef, Egypt researcher for Human rights Watch.
A 2008 study of the egyptian Center for Women's rights found that 83 percent of egyptian women reported sexual harassment, and 62 percent of egyptian men admitted.
That they had harassed women. "But we are sure that the numbers are higher," said Mona Ezzat, of the New Woman Foundation, an advocacy group in Cairo.
Heba Habib, a law student from Cairo, said she "couldn't take it" anymore. "Every day, dirty comments, the grabbing when you ride on the bus."
Once, she said, a cab driver started recounting his sexual fantasies. "I was so ashamed and tried to overcome it by laughing," the 22-year-old said. "When I got out of the car and wanted to pay him, I saw that his pants were down and he had been masturbating." She threw his fare on the seat and left. "You feel every day less and less like a human being."
Ms. Habib became a contributor to Harassmap (harassmap.org), a Web site run by volunteers. Anyone who has faced or witnessed sexual harassment can report it by sending a text message.
In reply, they receive offers of support and help. "These reports help us to build a map, which is public online," said Engy Ghozlan, the co-founder: "We point out where the hot spots are and what was reported to us."
Attitudes toward harassment and rape are often very anti-victim, with the women, not the men, blamed. The 12 women interviewed for this article and the advocacy groups all said that even if women reported serious cases of sexual assault, police officers often showed no sensitivity.
In some cases, officers told girls that they would create problems for themselves, that people would call them prostitutes bringing shame on their families if they report.
In the 2008 survey by the women's center, 53 percent of Egyptian men said that harassed women "bring it on."
Many women's groups in Egypt participated in the uprising, partly because they were hoping for change for women. When, on March 8, International Women's Day, Ms. Ezzat and members of her group went back to Tahrir Square to call for more rights, some men surrounded two of the younger members and "started touching different parts of the body," said Ms. Ezzat, 37. Women ran for help, and a soldier eventually intervened.
In June, an Egyptian female journalist was attacked in Tahrir Square. A police officer came to her aid. (In February, the American TV journalist Lara Logan was also attacked in Tahrir Square.)
Egyptian women and rights activists said they were more worried about the near future. In Egypt men traditionally are the primary wage earners. With the big decline in tourism after the revolution and increasing numbers of unemployed men, things might get worse, the women said.
All the women also advocated a broad debate involving politicians, the media, schools and religious institutions.
"I have two daughters and am teaching them two things," said Lamya Lofty, 32. "Don't let any men harass you, and before you get married to a man, see what his brothers and mother have to say about women."
