Men join effort to stop sex assaults
Poll finds 99.3% of Egyptian women face harassment in their lifetimes
Munir Tawab admits he added to Egypt’s reputation for catcalling and groping women on the street.
But a new movement led by one man to combat sexual harassment — considered the norm in this country — has changed Tawab’s actions.
“Before I came to these workshops, it did not occur to me that harassing girls was wrong,” said Tawab, 21, who drives a tuk tuk, one of the thousands of three- wheel, open taxis on the unpaved streets of Cairo’s slums. “Now I get that it is not a joke. Women have the same right to go in public and not be bothered, just as men do.”
He recently attended workshops organized by John Insan, 39, a community organizer with a background in theater arts, who wanted to change attitudes toward women after his father died.
“I was 14 when he died, and all the sudden I had this responsibility to basically be the bodyguard for my mom and my sister,” Insan said. “If my sister had a class or my mom needed to go to the market, I had to go with them and make sure they weren’t molested. And since I was just a kid, that did not always work.”
Today, Insan uses techniques he learned as a theater director — relaxation exercises, role playing and choreography — to raise awareness about the harm harassment causes to women and men.
“When I listened to the tuk tuk drivers and the garbage collectors who work on the streets and the doormen who live under the stairs in Cairo’s apartment buildings, I discovered they had no respect for themselves as hu- man beings,” Insan said. “This together with traditional ideas about women is the main cause of harassment.”
A recent United Nations survey reports that 99.3% of Egyptian women are sexually harassed in their lifetimes. Male religious figures like TV personality Sheik Sabri Abada commonly lend approval to the name- calling and assaults that victimize women.
“If the woman takes off her hijab ( head scarf ), she is naked,” the Muslim cleric said on a recent broadcast on the Egyptian satellite channel Dream TV. “The street belongs to everyone, and I want my son to be respected.”
Insan is not alone in trying to combat such attitudes.
“More women are insisting on their right to move freely in public spaces, and, just as importantly, more men have joined the fight,” said Amina Khairy, a well- known Egyptian TV personality who moderated a recent panel on harassment at the American University in Cairo.
That fight has become a full- time job for Ahmed Hegab, 32, a former telecommunications engineer who created Men Engage, a program that trains men to stop gender- based violence and to advocate for women’s empowerment in Egypt.
“For me it started five years ago when I was driving on a street downtown, and I saw a mob of young men assault a 17- year- old girl,” said Hegab, who rescued the girl by pulling her into his car. The crowd attacked and wrecked his car.
“I decided right there and then to quit my job and do everything I could to stop harassment,” Hegab said. He volunteered with Harassmap, a group that crowd- sources reports of sexual harassment and assault, mapping them online to show the scale of the problem.
He said the workshops by Men Engage have allowed hundreds of men to explore their feelings about their roles as bystanders, perpetrators and victims of violence themselves.
“Just last week I ran a workshop with 20 men, and 18 of them said they had seen horrific sexual shaming and assaults on boys,” Hegab said. “This is not about women, and it’s not about sex. This is about crime and violence and a social tendency not to report it.”