Headscarves and Hymens (10 page)

The next day, many of the activists who endured the assaults gathered for a protest to launch a short-lived movement called “The Street Is Ours.” Some of the women held up their torn clothes from the day before. Some later tried to sue the regime. (Even though they had photographs and videos of the sexual assaults, the cases were dismissed for “lack of evidence.”) Still other assaulted female activists spoke on satellite television about what had happened to them. This was one of the earliest attempts to throw off the gag of shame that prevents Egyptian women from speaking about sexual assault. Very few Egyptian women had ever previously made public their stories of survival. The impact of these testimonies was tremendous. It was the first time that many Egyptians had ever heard sexual assault openly discussed. I know that my own relatives were sickened and enraged when they heard the activists’ testimony.

One young woman told me that hearing this testimony was the moment of her politicization: “Nothing is my decision and I have no power over anything: My parents decide what I study at university and whom I’ll
marry. My boss decides what I can and can’t do with my time—I can’t leave work for protests. And then I saw those women on television talking about how they were assaulted and I understood that I don’t even have control over my own body—the state does.”

Remember that young woman’s words: she understands how her family, the street, and the state work in concert to reduce her autonomy over her own body.

When the state sexually assaults you—when the hands of its police force and paid thugs grope you, and the state denies you any legal redress—it sends a message to all that women’s bodies are fair game. Evidence of this was on display a year later, when groups of young women were assaulted in downtown Cairo during Eid, the religious holiday that celebrates the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. A large group of men assaulted women openly, during the day, with the audacity of those who know that the state will never punish them. Indeed, the assaults often occurred in view of police, who stood by and did nothing.

When news of the gang assaults surfaced on privately owned and foreign media, the state denied that the assaults—which, like the assaults it sponsored in 2005, were visible for all to see—had ever happened. Fortunately for the sake of truth, bloggers witnessed some of these assaults and snapped photos. Activists appearing on a satellite TV show took the chance to expose what had just happened, so that once again Egyptian audiences
heard of horrific sexual assaults, this time perpetrated by civilians instead of security forces.

When the bloggers posted their testimony on their blogs, an interesting thing happened. The comments sections were filled with responses from shocked and horrified men. How could this have happened? When did this start to happen? Once again, women responded, “Where have you been? Ask your wife, mother, sister, and female friends. This happens all the time!”

At a demonstration against street sexual harassment and assault that I attended in Cairo a few days after Eid there were nearly more riot police than protesters. My sister, Nora, was twenty at the time, and she, with several of her friends, joined the protest. She had never been to a demonstration before but was incensed after she heard the state denying something that had happened to her many times. We swapped our sexual harassment stories like veterans comparing war wounds.

That year, 2006, connected state and street violations of women’s bodies. It also finally led many women to push aside the taboo of talking about sexual harassment and assaults, to refuse the shame that too often was dumped on them instead of on the boys and men who were making their daily lives miserable.

When the revolution began, women marched alongside men, women fought police across the country and
in Cairo, and women resolutely stood their ground in Tahrir Square, refusing to leave despite Mubarak’s snipers, police, and plainclothes thugs. Those first eighteen days offered a utopian vision of what Egypt could be.

Many female protesters spent the night outside, in the square, violating the family-imposed curfews that controlled their daily lives. Not everyone could overcome their family’s rules, but for those who did, it was an unprecedented break with a code very few had challenged until then.

Many of my friends who spent nights out in the square told me they did not experience any kind of harassment, that men treated them with a respect and regard for their personal space and integrity that was unheard of on Egyptian streets before those eighteen days in Tahrir. One activist, however, told me he’d heard a few stories that challenged that idyllic image, but said that no one wanted to ruin the image of the revolution. I was not in Egypt during those eighteen days and cannot verify either case.

Whatever utopia existed in Tahrir, it was upended with a series of horrific sexual assaults that began on February 11, 2011, the day Mubarak was forced to step down and the day the South African television news correspondent Lara Logan, who reports for the U.S. network CBS, was sexually assaulted by a mob. Ever more audacious assaults followed, with impunity for the predators
and bewilderingly little public outrage. On March 8, 2011, there was a small but determined protest demanding that Egyptian women have a voice in building the country’s future—including the right to be president. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, their active role in the revolution, the two hundred women who formed the protest (together with some male supporters) were optimistic. But they were met with opposition from men in Tahrir Square, according to
The Christian Science Monitor,
and were set upon by men from outside the square who yelled at and in some cases groped and sexually assaulted several of the women and a few of the male protesters.

“Go home, go wash clothes,” yelled some of the men. “You are not married; go find a husband.”

The next day, March 9, 2011, soldiers cleared Tahrir Square of those who had returned to protest the slow pace of change under the military junta that had taken over after Mubarak’s ouster. The military arrested hundreds of demonstrators and threw them in military jails where many were tortured and beaten. According to human rights groups, seventeen female demonstrators were beaten, prodded with electric shock batons, subjected to strip searches, forced to submit to “virginity tests,” and threatened with prostitution charges.

Less than a month after Mubarak had stepped down, the military junta that replaced him, ostensibly to “protect the revolution,” had officers stick their fingers into
the vaginal openings of female revolutionaries—women who should have been our heroes—ostensibly in search of a hymen, ostensibly to protect the military from accusations of rape by the detainees (because only virgins can be raped of course). In other words, the Egyptian military sexually assaulted Egyptian women so that they could not “falsely” accuse the officers of sexual assault. Samira Ibrahim, one of the women subjected to sexual assault, sued, but a military court exonerated a military doctor she had accused of conducting the tests, despite the admission by several members of the ruling military junta, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, that the tests took place. Ibrahim told an online newspaper: “The person that conducted the test was an officer, not a doctor. He had his hand stuck in me for about five minutes. He made me lose my virginity. Every time I think of this, I don’t know what to tell you, I feel awful. I know that to violate a woman in that way is considered rape. I felt like I had been raped.”

It should’ve been our moment of reckoning. It should have sparked another revolution. Yet nothing happened. In fact, Salwa el-Hosseiny, the first woman to reveal the “virginity tests,” was called a liar and vilified for trying to turn people against the mantra “The army and the people are one hand,” which was popular when the military seemed to be siding with the people in the final days of Mubarak’s decline.

Perhaps “The army and the people are one hand” was
one of the most honest statements to come out of our revolution: one hand united and working against women, one hand that groped or beat women and tried to terrorize them out of public space, one hand that found it perfectly acceptable to force two fingers into a woman’s vagina.

Those women had risked their lives to liberate Egypt, and yet their violation was met with silence. That silence points to a truth: the regime oppressed everybody, but society particularly oppresses women. The regime knows it can violate women because society subjects women to the same violations; it knows that society will not speak out for its own women. In return for unaccountability for its oppressions, the regime turns a blind eye to society’s abuses, tacitly condoning harassment and assault.

Egypt’s current president, el-Sisi, approved of the March 2011 “virginity tests.” Since July 2013, when el-Sisi overthrew President Mohamed Morsi, who came from the Muslim Brotherhood movement, women who are affiliated with the Brotherhood—which has since been outlawed as a “terrorist group”—have also said they were subjected to “virginity tests” in detention. So it does not matter where you stand on Egypt’s political spectrum: if you are a woman, your body is not safe.

In the years between Mubarak’s downfall and the inauguration of el-Sisi, street sexual harassment, after being left unchecked for years, morphed into especially
vicious mob sexual assaults against women at protests and public celebrations. Egyptian human rights groups documented 250 cases of mob attacks against women in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the vicinity between November 2012 and January 2014.

Egypt is an important case study in how state and street work in tandem to push women out of public space. It also demonstrates how regimes, regardless of ideology, have proven unwilling or fundamentally unable to address what Human Rights Watch has described as “an epidemic of sexual violence.” One of the ways in which regimes and their supporters brushed aside and belittled concerns over women’s bodily integrity was to blame their opponents for attacking women. As each group busily defended its men against such accusations, the women, who should have been their main concern, were left out of the conversation.

It took mob sexual assaults, including a gang rape in Tahrir Square during the inauguration of el-Sisi in June 2014, to finally force an Egyptian president to speak about sexual violence against women. El-Sisi paid a visit to the victim of that gang rape, who was recovering in a hospital, and apologized to her. He vowed to take “very decisive measures” to combat sexual violence and, addressing Egypt’s judges, said, “Our honor is being violated on the streets, and that is not right.” Yet it is women’s bodies that are being violated, not Egypt’s “honor.”

Thanks to the tireless efforts of women’s rights groups
and small but incredibly courageous initiatives launched to combat growing street sexual violence, including HarassMap, Tahrir Bodyguard, and I Saw Harassment, in 2014 the state finally acknowledged the problem and seemed to act on it, criminalizing the physical and verbal harassment of women and setting unprecedented penalties for such crimes. In July, five men were jailed for life for attacking and harassing women during celebrations of el-Sisi’s inauguration in June. Reuters news agency reported that another defendant, aged sixteen, was jailed for twenty years, and a nineteen-year-old was given two twenty-year jail terms, though it was not immediately clear if these would run concurrently or consecutively. All seven were convicted of sexual harassment, under the new law, and of attempted rape, attempted murder, and torture.

In a reminder of how our criminal justice system often raises more questions and dilemmas than it answers, one of the five men was sentenced to life on separate charges of attacking a woman as she celebrated the anniversary of the 2011 revolt that toppled autocratic president Hosni Mubarak. Are our police just rounding up the usual suspects?

El-Sisi’s security forces must be held accountable for their assaults on female protesters. Until they are, their actions should be considered the height of hypocrisy. El-Sisi’s interior minister has promised to create a new department to combat violence, including the sexual
assault and harassment of women. But how will a police force that has harassed and assaulted women combat violence against women? How will that police force know how to act and what to do in cases of sexual assault and rape when it has no training in treating such crimes? Flourishes of words and chivalry are one thing. How those translate into concrete mechanisms that protect girls and women and ensure justice is another thing altogether.

In a dire irony, the extreme sexual violence has forced Egypt to pull ahead of other Arab nations in breaking the taboo of publicly discussing street assaults. Egypt’s brave activists have begun the difficult and necessary task of deflecting the shame from our bodies onto those who insist on violating them.

Almost every part of my body has been groped or touched without my consent. These assaults happened in Saudi Arabia, where I lived as a teenager, and in Egypt, where I returned to live at the age of twenty-one.

The state first forced its hands on my body on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, where in November 2011 five days of clashes occurred between demonstrators trying to protect Tahrir Square and the soldiers and police who attacked the families of revolutionaries and burned the tents of peaceful protesters.

The details of what happened to me mattered little to
the triage nurse in the emergency room of the private hospital where, about sixteen hours after riot police had broken my arms and sexually assaulted me, I was trying to get medical care.

“How could you let them do that to you? Why didn’t you resist?”

She might as well have asked me where my shame was. How could I “let” riot police sexually assault me, and how could I so brazenly describe what had happened to me? It had been many years since I was a virgin, but she was chiding me for my lack of moral virginity, if you will. A good virgin, a good moral virgin, would have “saved” herself from those men’s hands; a good moral virgin would have saved her breasts and her genitals; a good moral virgin would not have been there on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in the first place. Finally, a good moral virgin would not have so openly described her sexual assault.