Sexual harassment in Saudi Arabia up by 37% in 2017

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 

#Muslim woman attacked on Vienna train

A 37-year-old Muslim woman from Vienna has complained to police after being attacked by a woman whilst travelling on Vienna’s metro.

Zeliha Cicek

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.”

#Egypt needs a revolution against #sexual_violence

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?

-->

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 Morsi in 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.

--> 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.

A Man Dresses As A Woman To Experience Cairo's Street Harassmen

 

الإيحاءات الجنسية لنظام الأخوان 

 

 

 

الجنس في مجتمعنا " الشرقي " و نظرة الناس المزدوجة ليه

الجنس في مجتمعنا " الشرقي " و نظرة الناس المزدوجة ليه

الجنس هو أقصى درجة من ممارسة الحب بين الاحباء فيعتبره أغلب الرجال شيئا عظيما

و في نفس الوقت إذا أراد أحدهم إهانة شخص ما وصفه بألفاظ جنسية هو أو أمه أو زوجته و كأن الفعل الجنسي هنا إهانة أو ازدراء لا معنى عظيم للحب

إذا وجد الرجل في شريكته درجة ما من المعرفة الجنسية أو التجاوب الجنسي اعتبرها " شمال " و شك في أخلاقها

و إن وجد فيها جهلا أو عدم تجاوب اعتبرها " باردة " و غير مؤهلة لممارسة الحب معه ..

البنت تربى طول عمرها إن عيب تكلم الولاد أو تختلط بيهم .. الرجال جميعا أشرار و في نفس الوقت نطلب منها مرة واحدة أن تتعرى و تمارس الجنس مع زوجها الذي ربما لم تعرفه بالقدر الكافي و ربما يختلط لديها مفهوم الفضيلة فيخلق لديها مفهوم سلبي عن الجنس و مقاومة لا إرادية حتى مع زوجها


هي لا تعرف هل الجنس عيبا أو حراما أو مصدرا للسعادة

هي لا تعرف هل جسدها مصدر للنشوة أو الازدراء

هذه الازدواجية في مفهوم الرجال عن الجنس تجعل المرأة في حيرة في التعامل مع هذه الغريزة الراقية

Brides Bought, Sold and Resold

With millions more men than women in India,  many wonder about the state of bachelorhood in India.

There have been arguments that this “shortage” of women [as if women are a commercial resource] would force the ‘gender’ ratio to fix itself! But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The gender ratio keeps plummeting, and you don’t have communities going into panic saying “We need to find a woman for sex and reproduction!!”   Why is this economic/ “women as commodity” theory not working out the way it was assumed it would?

Perhaps because Indian men indeed view women as “commodity!”  And since there is a shortage of “female commodity” the users have found other methods of procuring women! They are now BUYING, SELLING, AND RECYCLING! It is another response to “commodity shortage”, and is essentially the Indian version of DOMESTIC SEX-TRAFFICKING.   This is a practice in India that is as old as female gendercide, and there are reports that it existed even as early as the 1900s.  Only now, with plummeting gender ratios, the practice is out in the open and increasing rapidly.  It is often referred to as ‘BRIDE-TRAFFICKING.’

Much of this sex-trafficking is in the guise of ‘marriage.’   Each family, community and people involved call it a ‘marriage.’  The girl or woman is sold as a ‘bride’ to a man.  She may be married to one man in a family but is used for sex and reproduction by the other men within the same family.  She is then re-sold again as a ‘bride’ to another family.  Some women are sold and resold up to four times, and there are indications that there are thousands of such ‘brides’ being trafficked in the name of ‘marriage.’ Most of these girls are 15 years or younger and often kidnapped and sold into “bride-trafficking”.

Government officials explain their lack of action against this form of sex-trafficking with, “”If they are legally wedded, what can we do.”

However, from many rural areas, families will often sell their daughters to a commercial “agent” for as little as U.K. £15

There is one report of a man beheading his “bought” wife for refusing to sleep with his brothers.

Munni who was forced to have sex with her husbands brothers, has had three sons from them.  It is interesting that all her children are boys, no girls.   It is believed that there may be many more women like Munni in the region. Here is Munni’s story in her words:

“My husband and his parents

said I had to share myself with his brothers…

They took me whenever they wanted – day or night.

When I resisted, they beat me with

anything at hand…Sometimes they threw me

out and made me sleep outside or they poured kerosene over

me and burned me.”



ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS: Claire Pismont and Delphines are members of The 50 Million Missing Campaign’s Photographers Group on Flickr.   supported by more than 2400 photographers from around the world.   To see more of each of their works, please click on the pictures.