Cairo: Egypt has criminalised sexual harassment for the first time, in a move that campaigners say is just the first step towards ending an endemic problem.
Egypt’s outgoing president, Adly Mansour, issued a decree that categorised sexual harassment as a crime punishable by a minimum six-month jail term and a fine worth 3,000 Egyptian pounds — with increased penalties for employers and repeat offenders. Sexual harassers have been prosecuted on rare occasions in the past in Egypt - but only on vaguer charges of physical assault, and even then the defendants have often been found innocent.
UN research from 2013 suggested that 99.3% of Egyptian women had experienced sexual harassment - but it is often the victims who are blamed for their experience, rather than the harassers. Campaigners welcomed the law, but warned that it remained to be seen whether it would be enforced by police.
“The biggest issue is still the cultural one: society doesn’t see it as a crime,” said Eba’a El-Tamimi, a spokesperson for HarassMap, a group that works to end harassment in Egypt. “And police often tend to sympathise with harassers or be harassers themselves. Even when someone manages to get to the police station to report harassment, she will still encounter resistance from police officers, who will try to deter her from going through with filing the police report.”
One woman who took her harasser to court in 2013 — and successfully won a rare conviction on assault charges — said at the time that the police had been one of the biggest obstacles to the case. “You think I’m going to lock up every man who beats someone in the street?” one official allegedly told her after she first tried to file the charges. Guardian news
