Sexual harassment in Saudi Arabia up by 11.4% in 2016
A recent field study conducted by the “Institute for International Research”, a Canadian institute specializing in research and field studies in economic, political, and social fields, has revealed that sexual harassment in Saudi Arabia has increased 11.4% in 2016, compared to 2014.
The study, in which 120 thousand women from 49 countries took part in, found that there has been a sharp increase in those countries which also include Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Benin, Mali, Mauritania, and Uganda.
The study, which chose 15 thousand women from Saudi Arabia, found that 37% were subjected to verbal
sexual harassment, 34% to ogling, 36% to “numbering”, in which the harasser attempt to give his victim his phone number, and 25% to unwanted physical contact (touching parts of the body).
According to the study, the age of the women participating in it ranged between 12 to 38 years. Women were also harassed regardless of whether they were made-up or not, indicating that the predator does not care for the kind of victim.
The institute’s study also indicated that 46% of the women believed that their driving a car helps to a
degree in raising women’s level of social security in Saudi society, and therefore banning them from driving makes them vulnerable to predation by drivers and bystanders in the streets.
The study shows that harassment in Saudi Arabia is much higher than countries less developed in terms of economy and security. Furthermore, this study only took into account Saudi women, and not foreign women residing in Saudi Arabia as there is need for another study that shows how these women are harassed in the kingdom. These women live under painful and difficult conditions working as maids, whose guarantors (kafeel) to harass them however they wish, and the law does not protect them.
4118 Saudi women came forth with sexual harassment charges in 2016 according to the Saudi Justice Ministry. 78% of the women taking part in the Institute for International Research’s study also believe that the real numbers of sexual harassment in Saudi Arabia are much higher than the ones declared by the government, because women are afraid of being beaten, violated, or of the negative way they may be viewed by their husbands, or by society, as coming forth to court to register such a charge is considered to be “sacrificing one’s honor.”
Harassment cases in 2016 were at 7.6/day according to official and non-official sources; meanwhile the Saudi Justice Ministry blames the foreigners for these numbers, whereas human rights organizations state that the harassment cases for which foreigners are guilty constitute only 19% of the cases. Reuters had published a report in 2014, placing Saudi Arabia in 3rd place among 24 countries in worksite sexual harassment cases, stating that 16% of women working in Saudi Arabia have been sexually harassed by their superiors at work. 92% of Saudi women have been harassed in one form or another according to a series of studies by Saudi researcher Noura al-Zahrani.
Saudi Arabia has no laws that protect harassed women, and most laws favor the men. Many extremist Wahhabi scholars such as the Kingdom’s Mufti Abedlaziz al-Sheikh and Sheikh ‘A’ed al-Qarni, Mohammad al-Arifi, and others, have stood against any attempts at reform for Saudi women, including the anti-harassment bill that was discussed a few years ago in the Shura council, and was later abandoned due to extremists rising against it saying “it helps spread the concept of intersex mingling in society.”
Saudi scholar Abdullah Dawood launched in May 2013 the “#Harass_Cashiers” hashtag, through which he called for harassing female employees and saleswomen in clothes shops; however he was not tried for his statements that violate humane and international laws.
The Saudi government has attempted to separate female and male workplaces, but apparently this step was very unsuccessful on the ground, and so the government claimed that the increase of harassment in society is due to the increase in the female workforce. Would this excuse convince the public?
#YOU CAN SEE MORE VIDEO FORM HERE
Minha Husaini she girl 22 old i think,she finish her study in Tourism and because no security now work for must of egyptian people .
she shift her hair to can deal with guys in st, and Most of the time, sexual harassment, and she go to work in tahrir Sq !!! in down town ,,,, its dangers place , but she go bur the police come after her
and they asked her to give then money to let her work ;)
She believes that the woman, who hit her in the face, did so because she was wearing a headscarf. Police said they believed the attacker was “disturbed”.
Zeliha Cicek is the third Muslim to have been assaulted in Vienna in the last month.
Cicek, a school teacher and mother of three children, is ethnically Turkish. She said she was talking to her sister on an U3 underground train on her mobile phone when the woman started shouting at her in English. “I calmly told her she could speak to me in German and suddenly she stood up and slapped me in the face. I dropped my phone and it broke, I was so shocked,” she said.
An English man came to Cicek’s aid but the angry woman scratched his face. She got out of the train at Stephansplatz – and despite Cicek screaming that she had attacked her the woman was able to flee without being stopped.
Cicek told the Kurier newspaper that she didn’t believe that the woman was drunk or mad. “The English man also thought that she had a problem with me wearing the headscarf,” she said.
In August two elderly Muslim ladies wearing headscarves were attacked in Favoritenstraße. Police were reportedly slow to respond to this incident, and only began questioning suspects days after.
Austria’s Islamic Religious Community Association said that Muslims often experience discrimination in Austria but that “it is not well documented”. Spokeswoman Carla Amina Baghajati said that the association plans to start collecting data on all religiously motivated incidents. However, she said she did not believe that the police lacked sensitivity to the issue.
Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner again warned against the “spread of hatred and incitement by populists. They become complicit when it comes to attacks on innocent people.”
According to UNICEF, 91% of women in Egypt are victims of female genital mutilation (FGM) - the largest number in a single country in the world.
The image below was shared by CNN in 1996 and caused outrage, and shows a 10-year-old girl being mutilated at a barbershop in Cairo.
Due to this, there are many misconceptions surrounding the legality and religiosity of FGM.
FGM was illegalized in Egypt in 1996 (except in hospitals). However, it was the death of an 11-year-old girl in 2007 that led to the complete ban of FGM in Egypt.
In 1997, Egypt's Al-Azhar Institution, the highest authority in the Sunni Islamic world, stated that female circumcision is "un-Islamic" and has nothing to do with religion. The former Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi, even declared that his own daughter had not undergone the operation.
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In the past two years, Al-Azhar has reiterated that FGM is un-Islamic and should not occur under any circumstances. Nevertheless, Al-Azhar's calls were silenced during Morsi's regime which was dominated by ultra-conservative Islamists.
While more than three-quarters of Egyptian girls are said to have had their genitals mutilated by this illegal act that violates basic human rights, the government (both current and past) continues to ignore the problem and fails to raise awareness.
Prevalence of FGM in Africa. For more detailed maps, see Mackie and UNICEF 2013, p. 26.
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Information about the prevalence of FGM has been collected since 1989 in a series ofDemographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). In 2013 UNICEF published a report based on 70 of these surveys, indicating that FGM is concentrated in 27 African countries, as well as in Yemen and Iraqi Kurdistan, and that 125 million women and girls in those countries have been affected
The practice is mostly found in what political scientist Gerry Mackie describes as an "intriguingly contiguous zone" in Africa, from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east, and from Egypt in the north to Tanzania in the south, intersecting in Sudan.[72] According to UNICEF, the top rates are in Somalia (with 98 percent of women affected), Guinea (96 percent), Djibouti (93 percent), Egypt (91 percent), Eritrea (89 percent), Mali (89 percent), Sierra Leone (88 percent), Sudan (88 percent), Gambia (76 percent), Burkina Faso (76 percent), Ethiopia (74 percent), Mauritania (69 percent), Liberia (66 percent), and Guinea-Bissau (50 percent).
Around one in five cases is in Egypt. Forty-five million women over the age of 15 who had experienced FGM were living in Egypt, Ethiopia and northern Sudan as of 2008, and nine million were in Nigeria.[74] Most of the women experience Types I and II. Type III is predominant in Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan, and in areas of Eritrea and Ethiopia near those countries. USAID estimated in 2008 that around eight million women in Africa over the age of 15 were living with Type III.
Outside Africa FGM occurs in Yemen (23 percent prevalence), among the Kurds in Iraq (giving the country an overall prevalence rate of eight percent), Indonesia and Malaysia.[76] It has been documented in India, among the Bedouin in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and by anecdote in Colombia, Oman, Peru and Sri Lanka.[77] There are indications that it is performed in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, although no nationally representative information is available for those countries.[78] There are also immigrant communities that practise it in Australia and New Zealand, Europe, Scandinavia, the United States and Canada.[11]
In 2013 UNICEF reported a downward trend in some countries. In Kenya and Tanzania women aged 45–49 years were three times more likely to have been cut than girls aged 15–19, and the rate among adolescents in Benin, Central African Republic, Iraq, Liberia and Nigeria had dropped by almost half.[79] In 2005 the organization reported that the median age at which FGM was performed had fallen in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Kenya and Mali. Possible explanations include that, in countries clamping down on the practice, it is easier to cut a younger child without being discovered, and that the younger the girls are, the less they can resist.
Brave Little Girl Flees Forced Marriage, Records Powerful Testimonial
The longstanding severity of Yemen's child marriages
is gaining some much needed sunlight this week after a young survivor
of this shocking custom took it upon herself to speak out on behalf of
the untold many who can't.
Nada al-Ahdal, an 11-year-old from Sana’a, had been promised by her parents to an adult suitor not once, but twice.
The "gifted
singer" had been raised by her uncle Abdel Salam al-Ahdal since
practically birth, and had been given the opportunity to go to school
and learn English.
Abdel
Salam, who was also raising a nephew and his aging mother, attempted to
guard young Nada from any attempt by her biological parents to marry her
off to a rich groom, having experienced the death of his sister by
self-immolation over an arranged marriage.
When Nada
turned 10, Abdel Salam learned that Nada's mother and father had indeed
sold her off to a Yemeni expat living in Saudi Arabia.
He phoned the groom in a panic, desperate to get him to rescind his offer.
"I called the groom and told him Nada was no good for him," Abdel Salam told the Lebanese publication NOW.
"I told him she did not wear the veil and he asked if things were going
to remain like that. I said ‘yes, and I agree because she chose it.’ I
also told him that she liked singing and asked if he would remain
engaged to her."
The man was persuaded to call the whole thing off, leaving Nada's parents "disappointed."
Months
later they arrived in Sana'a, ostensibly to visit their daughter, but in
reality were there to kidnap her and attempt another arranged marriage.
Nada asked to be returned to her uncle, but was told she had already been promised to someone.
She reunited with her uncle, who took her straight to the authorities.
After an
investigation was opened into the forced marriage allegations, Nada's
dad suddenly backed off the idea, and permitted her to continue living
with her uncle.
"I managed to solve my problem, but some innocent children can't solve theirs," Nada said in a confessional released yesterday by MEMRI-TV.
"[A]nd they might die, commit suicide, or do whatever comes to
mind...It's not our fault. I'm not the only one. It can happen to any
child."
In November 2011, after I joined a protest
on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in Cairo with a friend, Egyptian riot police
beat me – breaking my left arm and right hand – and sexually assaulted
me. I was also detained by the interior minister and military
intelligence for 12 hours.
After I was released, it took all I had
not to cry when I saw the look on the face of a very kind woman I'd
never met before, except on Twitter, who came to pick me up and take me
to the emergency room for medical attention. (She is now a cherished
friend.)
As I described to the female triage nurse what had had happened to me, she stopped at "and they sexually assaulted me" to ask:
how could you let them do that to you? Why didn't you resist?
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It
had been about 14 or 15 hours since riot police had attacked me; I just
wanted to be X-rayed to see if they had broken anything. Both arms
looked like the Elephant Man's limbs. I explained to the nurse that when
you're surrounded by four or five riot police, whacking at you with
their night sticks, there isn't much "resisting" one can do.
I've
been thinking a lot about that exchange with the nurse. Whenever I read
the ghastly toll of how many women were sexually assaulted during last
week's protests against Mohamed Morsiin Tahrir Square, I have to wonder about such harshness after brutality.
Activists
with grassroots groups on the ground who intervene to extricate women
from sexual violence in Tahrir said they documented more than 100 cases;
several were mob assaults, several requiring medical attention. One
woman was raped with a sharp object. I hope none was asked "why didn't
you resist?"
This isn't an essay on how Egyptian regimes like
Mubarak's targeted female activists and journalists as a political ploy.
Nor is it about how regimes like Morsi's largely ignored sexual
violence, and even when it did acknowledge it, blamed women for bringing
assaults upon themselves. Nor is it an article about how such assaults
and such refusal to hold anyone accountable have given a green light to
our abusers that women's bodies are fair game. Nor will I tell you that –
were it not for the silence and denial surrounding sexual assault in Egypt – such assaults would not be enacted so frequently on women's bodies on the Egyptian streets.
I
don't know who is behind those mob assaults in Tahrir, but I do know
that they would not attack women if they didn't know they would get away
with it and that the women would always be asked "why didn't you
resist?"
From the ground up, we need a national campaign against
sexual violence in Egypt. It must push whoever we elect to govern Egypt next, as well as our legislators, to take sexual assaults more
seriously.
If our next president chooses – as Morsi did – to
address the nation from a stage in Tahrir Square for the inauguration,
let him (or her) salute the women who turned out in their thousands upon
thousands in that same square, knowing they risked assaults and yet
refusing to be pushed out of public space. The square's name literally
means "liberation", and it will be those women who, in spite of the risk
of sexual violence, will have helped to enable his (or her) presence
there as the new president of Egypt.
Undoubtedly, the Egyptian
interior ministry needs reform, especially when it comes to how it deals
with sexual assault. The police rarely, if ever, intervene, or make
arrests, or press charges. It was, after all, the riot police themselves
who assaulted me. Their supervising officer even threatened me with
gang rape as his conscripts continued their assault of me in front of him.
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Any
woman who ends up in the ER room deserves much better than "why didn't
you resist?" Nurses and doctors need training in how best to care for
survivors of sexual assault and how to gather evidence.Female
police units are said to have been introduced at various precincts, but
they need training. They also need rape kits – in the unlikely event any
woman actually gathers herself enough to report rape in Egypt. When I
was reporting on sexual violence in Cairo in the 1990s, several
psychiatrists told me their offices were the preferred destination for
women who had survived sexual violence, be it at home or on the streets,
because they feared being violated again in police stations.
While
that fear is still justifiable today, something has begun to change:
more and more women are willing to go public to recount their assaults. I
salute those women's courage, but I wonder where they find comfort and
support after their retelling is over. PTSD therapy is not readily
available in Egypt. We need to train more of our counsellors to offer it
to those who want it.
We need to recruit popular football and
music stars in advertising campaigns: huge, presidential election
campaign style billboards across bridges and buildings – addressing men
with clear anti-sexual violence messages, for example – as well as
television and radio spots. Culture itself has a role to play in
changing this culture: puppet theatre and other arts indigenous to Egypt
can help break the taboo of speaking out; and we need more TV shows and
films that tackle sexual assaults in their storylines.
There is
an innate and burning desire for justice in Egypt. Revolutions will do
that. We need to coordinate efforts and aim high to ensure such a
campaign meets the needs of girls and women across the country, not just
Cairo and the big cities.
In January 2012, I spent a few days
with a fierce 13-year-old girl we'll call Yasmine, for a documentary
film, on which I was a writer, called Girl Rising. The film paired nine
female writers with girls each from their country of birth whose stories
they recounted to illustrate the importance of girls' education.
Five
months before we met, Yasmine had survived a rape. My arms were still
broken and in casts when we met and I naively considered removing the
casts and pretending I was OK in order to "protect her". I did not want
her to think that 30 years down the line, at my age, she could still be
subject to such violation.
She certainly did not need my
protection and I'm glad I kept my casts on, because as soon as we met,
she simply and forthrightly told me:
I'm going to open my heart to you and you're going to open your heart to me, OK?
She
then went on to recount what happened to her. I admired her courage and
her insistence on going to the police with her mother to report the
rape. She was lucky she found an understanding police officer who took
her complaint seriously.
When I told her what had happened to me,
she was shocked that it was police who'd attacked me. "Have you reported
what happened to you? Have you taken them to court?" she asked me.
Yasmine has not had a single day of formal education. She believed she deserved justice. We all do.
Violence against women in Egypt gained national and international
attention following a series of well-publicized sexual assaults on women
in the vicinity of Tahrir Square earlier this year during protests
commemorating the second anniversary of the “25 January Revolution”.
Unfortunately, these instances of violence against women were neither isolated nor unique.
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Whether in the public or private spheres, at the hands of state or
non-state actors, violence against women in Egypt continues to go mostly
unpunished.
Most cases go unreported for a plethora of reasons that stem from
discriminatory gender stereotypes, the lack of women’s awareness of
their rights, social and family pressures to remain silent,
discriminatory legislation and women’s economic dependence. Even when
women do surmount these obstacles and turn to state institutions for
protection, justice and reparation, they are often confronted with
dismissive or abusive officials who fail to refer cases to prosecution
or trial, and lengthy and expensive court proceedings if they want to
get divorced. Women who do manage to obtain a divorce then face the
likelihood that court orders for child support or spousal maintenance
will not be enforced.
In recent weeks during an Amnesty International mission to Egypt, I
met several women and girls who were assaulted by their husbands and
other relatives. Many suffer in silence for years while they are
subjected to beatings, severe physical and verbal abuse and rape.
Om Ahmed (mother of Ahmed) told me that her husband began drinking
and beating her after three years of marriage. She recounted daily
abuse, punctuated with particularly vicious attacks. In one instance,
her ex-husband smashed a full glass bottle on her face, leaving her
without her front teeth. She stayed with him for another 17 years,
partially, she explained, because she had nowhere else to go, and
partially because she did not want to bring “shame” on her family. She
never considered approaching the police, shrugging:
“The police don’t care, they don’t think it is a problem if a husband
beats his wife. If you are a poor woman, they treat you like you don’t
even exist and send you back home to him after hurling a few insults.”
Eventually, Om Ahmed’s husband kicked her out of their home, and for
the next year she lived with her three children in an unfinished
building in an informal settlement without running water and
electricity. After two years in family court, she was awarded a meagre
150 Egyptian pounds (approx. US$21) per month for her daughter’s child
support (her other two children don’t qualify for it as they over 18).
Her own spousal maintenance decision is still pending.
Unlike Egyptian Muslim men who can divorce their wives unilaterally –
and without giving any reason – women who wish to divorce their abusive
husbands have to go to court and prove “fault” or that their marriage
caused them “harm”. To prove physical harm, they have to present
evidence, such as medical reports or eyewitness testimony, in
proceedings that are drawn out and expensive. Many women’s rights
lawyers and lawyers working in family court cases told me that this is a
very difficult task for many women because they don’t always report the
abuse to the police, and neighbours, who are usually the only witnesses
other than household members, are reluctant to get involved.
I met one woman who had a particularly striking case. She told me:
“We [my ex-husband and I] only lived together for a few months, but
it took me six years to get a divorce, and I am still in court to get my
full [financial] rights back. Problems started soon after we got
married, and he would beat me. His mother and sisters were also abusive…
After a particularly bad beating, I went to the police station to lodge
a complaint, but I withdrew it under pressure [from my husband who
threatened me]. The case took so long because he had good lawyers who
knew all the loopholes in the law.”
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In 2000, a second option for women seeking divorce was introduced,
whereby women can obtain khul’ (no-fault divorce) from the courts
without having to prove harm, but only if they forego their right to
spousal maintenance and other financial rights. These court proceedings
can still take up to a year and put women who are financially dependent
on their husbands at a severe disadvantage. Despite this, several
divorcees told Amnesty International that they opted for khul’ after
waiting for a court fault-based divorce for years.
Twenty-four-year-old Om Mohamed (mother of Mohamed) told Amnesty International:
“We have been separated for over four years, but I am still neither
married nor divorced… I was trying to prove all this time in court that
he didn’t spend any money on me or our son, and that [my husband] used
to beat me with whatever he could find under his hands, including belts
and wires. Every time I go to court, the hearing is postponed, and I
need this or that paper. I spent a lot of money on lawyers, and got
nowhere… Eventually, I gave up and in January [2013] I raised a khul’
case.”
During my visit to Egypt in May and June this year, I also met women
and girls who suffered violence and sexual abuse at the hands of other
relatives. A 17-year-old girl told me that she ran away from home after a
particularly brutal beating by her brother, who stabbed her in the nose
with a kitchen knife, and burned her with a hot iron. Her scars
corroborated her story. She was too scared to report the incident at the
hospital where she sought treatment, as her brother had accompanied her
and threatened to kill her if she spoke out. She spent months wandering
the streets before being admitted into a private shelter for children.
Another woman who fled home after her brother sexually assaulted her
found temporary protection in a shelter run by an association under the
Ministry of Insurances and Social Affairs. She fled from the shelter
after the administration insisted that she give them her brother’s
contact details, to try to set up a “reconciliation meeting”.
There are only nine official shelters across Egypt, which are
severely under-resourced and in need of capacity-building and training.
Most survivors of domestic violence don’t even know they exist. The idea
of shelters is not widely accepted, because of the stigma attached for
women living outside their family or marital homes.
A staff member at a shelter recounted to me how, after an
awareness-raising session in a village in Upper Egypt, a village leader
got up and – in front of all those gathered – threatened to “stab to
death” any woman who dared to leave an abusive household and run to a
shelter. In another instance, the husband of a woman living in a shelter
threatened to set it on fire.
In May, the authorities announced the establishment of a special
female police unit to combat sexual violence and harassment. While this
may be a welcome step, the Egyptian authorities need to do much more to
prevent and punish gender-based violence and harassment, starting by
unequivocally condemning it. They also need to amend legislation to
ensure that survivors receive effective remedies. They must also show
political will and tackle the culture of denial, inaction and, in some
cases complicity, of law enforcement officials who not only fail to
protect women from violence but also to investigate properly all
allegations and bring perpetrators to trial.
Egyptian women were at the forefront of the popular protests that
brought down Hosni Mubarak’s presidency some two and a half years ago.
Today, they continue to challenge the prevailing social attitudes and
gender biases that facilitate violence against women, in all its forms,
to continue with impunity – while they continue their fight against
marginalization and exclusion from the political processes shaping the
country’s future.
Meanwhile, with the help of human and women’s rights organizations,
seven women who were sexually assaulted around Tahrir Square lodged a
complaint with the prosecution in March 2013 calling for accountability
and redress. Investigations were started, but have since stalled.
One of the lawyers for the women was told by a prosecutor that the
case was not that “important” compared to other cases on his desk. But
the plaintiffs are not giving up. As one of them told Amnesty
International: “Even as I was being abused, I felt that I will not stay
quiet, I will not back down. They have to be punished.”
By Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Egypt researcher
