Howaida Kamel, Cairo Community Manager
“All I remember is hands all over my body, grabbing under the layers of pullovers I was wearing, touching my breasts, opening my bra. More hands on my back and legs, my pants being pulled down. I tried to see the end of circle of men, but saw rows of men surrounding me, all pushing towards me. One man moved towards me in the middle of maybe forty men. When I could reach his hand, I just hugged the stranger and told him to help me. We moved further into the square and the man started moving faster. At that point I was not sure anymore whether he would help me or whether he was collaborating with the rest of the men. I panicked. I looked for other people to help. I saw a guy wearing one of the Operation Anti Sexual Harassment t-shirts and I started shouting louder. Luckily he saw me and made his way towards me. He grabbed me and held me and told me he would help me. I fell, the guy helped me up and I got up and was surrounded by women and men of the Anti Harassment group.”
This testimony is from a woman who was assaulted in Tahrir on Jan 25, 2013, as released by OpAntiSH.
Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault (OpAntiSH) is an activist group founded in November 2012 with the purpose of keeping female protestors physically and psychologically safe while attending rallies in Tahrir and Itahedeya. The organization is comprised of volunteers that patrol the squares during protests and that are trained to intervene in the case of group assaults. They also provide legal, medical, and psychological assistance for victims, as well as outreach and publicity campaigns to raise awareness about sexual harassment as a crime.
Aalam Wassef, an OpAntiSH coordinator, stated in an interview in the Egypt Independent that there is a deliberate attempt to scare women from protesting, “making them feel threatened and unsafe.” Most of the cases that OpAntiSH has intervened in have been “coordinated and organized mobs of harassers that are armed and most likely paid to do so.”
To combat these crimes, the organization has devised a system with approximately six groups of fifteen people, each patrolling different sections of Tahrir, wearing T-shirts with “A Safe Square for All” printed in red. Members have been trained to respond to attacks reported through the hotline numbers the group has set also up. Once they reach the scene of the crime, the team forms a human chain around the women, while a female volunteer enters to help clothe the victim, and the group moves as a unit to bring her to safety.
In an official a press release, OpAnti SH announced that there were 46 reported incidents of sexual assault in the June 30 protests, but the group assumes that there were many others that went unreported. In order to reduce the number of incidents, the group has suggested illuminating the entrances to Tahrir and using state media outlets through the Egyptian and Radio Television Union to create public service announcements and anti-harassment campaigns.
Through their efforts, OpAntiSH and other anti-harassment organizations have indeed managed to change the social perception of sexual harassment in the last two years. There has been a significant shift in the terminology: these crimes are now being referred to as taharosh, “harassment”, rather than mu’aksa, which roughly translates to “heckling”. The volunteers of OpAntiSH and other activist groups have taken it upon themselves to provide safety and security for the millions of Egyptians who attend protests, fighting to give Egypt a better future.
Photo credits: Heba Farouk and Gigi Ibrahim