Sexual Harassment in Egypt
Sexual harassment
Everyday the Egyptian streets are becoming more and more hostile to women this is due to the exacerbating problem of sexual harassment. This despicable trend is somehow new to the Egyptian society as before the 80’s when Egypt was more secular sexual harassment wasn’t noticed in the streets. However, starting from the 80’s many religious movements started to appear in Egypt and women were becoming more conservative but surprisingly harassment began to appear. The vicinity of this problem is increasing rapidly; thus, it would be insurmountable to eliminate, if firm actions are not taken immediately. This problem increased to the extent that some statistical reports states that 83% of Egyptian women faced sexual harassment and 98% of foreign women visiting Egypt. Moreover, the British office of Foreign affairs issued a report that Egypt is one of the countries with highest number of reported cases of sexual harassments against British citizens; therefore, it has asked its citizens to be extra caution in Egyptian streets (Abdelhadi). In order to reduce this tendency/this trend, many Egyptian scholars and feminist groups researched the causes of its appearance/development/increase. Many causes were identified: some of them may be key contributors to sexual harassments; others are fake reasons that some groups created to delude people into doing things which I will analyze in this paper. To begin with, what is sexual harassment and how to identify it? Before discussing the causes of sexual harassment, it should be comprehensively defined with its various types and forms. According to the law of civil rights of 1964 of the United States, sexual harassment is “any unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual work performance or
Everyday the Egyptian streets are becoming more and more hostile to women this is due to the exacerbating problem of sexual harassment. This despicable trend is somehow new to the Egyptian society as before the 80’s when Egypt was more secular sexual harassment wasn’t noticed in the streets. However, starting from the 80’s many religious movements started to appear in Egypt and women were becoming more conservative but surprisingly harassment began to appear. The vicinity of this problem is increasing rapidly; thus, it would be insurmountable to eliminate, if firm actions are not taken immediately. This problem increased to the extent that some statistical reports states that 83% of Egyptian women faced sexual harassment and 98% of foreign women visiting Egypt. Moreover, the British office of Foreign affairs issued a report that Egypt is one of the countries with highest number of reported cases of sexual harassments against British citizens; therefore, it has asked its citizens to be extra caution in Egyptian streets (Abdelhadi). In order to reduce this tendency/this trend, many Egyptian scholars and feminist groups researched the causes of its appearance/development/increase. Many causes were identified: some of them may be key contributors to sexual harassments; others are fake reasons that some groups created to delude people into doing things which I will analyze in this paper. To begin with, what is sexual harassment and how to identify it? Before discussing the causes of sexual harassment, it should be comprehensively defined with its various types and forms. According to the law of civil rights of 1964 of the United States, sexual harassment is “any unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual work performance or
Cited: | 9 |