Conditions for Fighting VAW: The Case of Sexual Harassment Activism in Egypt

• In Event: Activism against, and Accountability for, Sexual Violence in the Global South

Abstract

Sexual harassment is very common in public places in Egypt, with a 2013 U.N. Women poll showing that 99% of girls and women had experienced harassment, most frequently in the streets or public transport. The Egyptian government has made major strides against public sexual harassment (PSH) since 2014, amending the penal code to define harassment and specify criminal penalties and founding an all-women police force to fight PSH. Women winning jail sentences against attackers has become more common, and this government signalling of the unacceptability of PSH has enabled TV personalities, in the now fully government-controlled media, to praise women who pursue these cases as models.

This paper draws on over 60 interviews conducted in 2012-2014 with anti-PSH activist groups, examination of publicly recorded arrests of harassers, and analysis of widely-watched TV talk shows to argue that the main driver of Egyptian government action was youth groups created after the Egyptian revolution. This finding contravenes existing hypotheses on the conditions which lead governments to act against violence against women (VAW), and against sexual harassment specifically, none of which were met in the Egyptian case. In The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights Around the World (2018), Htun and Weldon argue that where feminist movements are strong and autonomous, and where their work is buttressed by a country’s withdrawal of its reservations on CEDAW and a climate in which neighboring countries are also legislating against VAW, governments are most likely to act. These arguments fail to explain the Egyptian case, where the government has not withdrawn its CEDAW reservations and Egypt’s anti-PSH legislation predates that of other countries in the region. Domestically, established feminist movements supported Egypt’s burgeoning anti-PSH activism post-2011 but did not create or direct it. The middle-aged female lawyers and professors who led the feminist movement before and after the 2011 revolution had focused on improving legal rights in the private sphere, including raising girls’ marriage age, and on building gender equality into the post-2011 constitution. The new movements against sexual harassment, by contrast, were made up of both men and women largely in their 20s who were in many cases completely new to political activism and often did not identify as feminists.

In Seeking Legitimacy: Why Arab Autocracies Adopt Women’s Rights (2019), Aili Mari Tripp contends that the Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian governments have been the only ones in the region to pass comprehensive anti-VAW legislation because those governments a) used women’s rights to undermine Islamist challengers, and because b) feminist movements coordinated across borders to advance this legislation. Far from using anti-PSH legislation as a wedge against domestic Islamist challengers, the Egyptian government began acting against PSH after it had largely eliminated its Islamist opponents, beginning with an August 2013 massacre whose magnitude was compared by Human Rights Watch to that of Tiananmen Square, followed by criminalization of the country’s largest Islamist party. Egypt’s anti-PSH legislation preceded that of its regional neighbors and established feminist groups did not work with regional counterparts to strategize for its passage.

My work examines the conditions for the founding, expansion, and communication of the goals of several new youth movements working against harassment beginning in 2012 and traces the ways that their work led to government action on PSH. These groups sought to intervene directly in public spaces to prevent harassment, including physically separating groups of men following women in shopping areas during Muslim holidays (‘eids). They also did public demonstrations and private workshops educating Egyptians against common stereotypes on PSH, including that harassment is largely a manifestation of the sexual frustration of men unable to raise the money to marry. Anti-PSH groups were covered widely on popular TV talk shows, and these appearances served as a “force multiplier” for groups’ messages, as members were asked questions that allowed them to expose common misconceptions about harassment, such as the idea that only “improperly” dressed women are harassed. Anti-PSH groups’ tallies of the number of women harassed during ‘eids were carried on several major talk shows and directly influenced the decision to create all-women police forces to patrol major areas during these holidays.

The importance of youth who are often new to activism in organizing anti-PSV mobilization has also been noted in India (Kapur, 2013; Kurian, 2018) and China (Zheng 2015). The Egyptian case thus suggests that conditions under which governments can be pushed to fight PSV diverge from that documented for anti-VAW action.

Author

• Vickie Langohr