Taharrush jamai
Tahrir Square, Cairo, where hundreds of women have been sexually assaulted
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| Activism | HARASSmap, Operation Anti Sexual Harassment |
| Related | Sexual assault, sexual violence, gang rape |
The mass sexual assault of women in public has been documented in Egypt since 2005. In May 2005 Egyptian security forces and their agents were blamed for using it during political demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Cairo, as a weapon against female protesters. The behavior spread, and by 2012 sexual assault by crowds of young men was regularly seen at protests and religious festivals in Egypt.
In these assaults, assailants would encircle a woman while outer rings of men deter rescuers. The attackers regularly pretended to be there to help the women, adding to the confusion. Women reported being groped, stripped, beaten, bitten, penetrated with fingers, and raped. The attacks were described as the "circle of hell."
Commentators say the attacks reflect a misogynist ideology that penalizes women for leaving the house, seeks to terrorize them out of public life, and views sexual violence as a source of shame for the victim, not the attacker.
Sexual harassment was barely discussed in Egypt before 2006. The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights sought to draw attention to it, but the public's response was that it was an American idea wrongly applied to Egyptian society.
Mass sexual assault was first documented during the Egyptian constitutional referendum on 25 May 2005, on what became known as "Black Wednesday," when women demonstrators were sexually assaulted by a group of agents provocateurs, groups of men who had arrived on buses, as police watched and did nothing to intervene.
The issue attracted more discussion following the Eid al-Fitr holiday in 2006, when on 24 October a crowd of young men who had been denied entry to a cinema in Cairo engaged in a five-hour-long mass sexual assault of women in Talaat Harb Street. Police were reported to have done nothing to stop it, although many bystanders tried to help the women.
The attacks gained prominence outside Egypt in February 2011 when Lara Logan, a correspondent for the American network CBS, was sexually assaulted by hundreds of men in Tahrir Square, Cairo, while reporting on the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. By 2012, according to Al Akhbar, such attacks had become a "prominent feature" of religious festivals in Egypt.
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Wikipedia