Why Can't I Walk to the Grocery Store in Peace?

Yesterday, I walked to the grocery store down the street from my house to buy some food for a family get together later that evening. It was about 9:30am and the pollution was doing little to stem the effects of the morning heat.

In my short walk from my apartment to the store, I would need both hands to count how many catcalls I received. These abuses on my freedom to walk peacefully and without harassment came from microbuses, cars, people walking on the street, and the grocery store workers themselves.

This is what happens when I walk outside my door.

Recently, there has been a lot of coverage about the savage mob attack on a young female British journalist in the area of Tahrir. Ahram Online, an Egyptian English news website, reported this story of multiple women who have faced similar attacks in the past year.

While these attacks are brutal and horrific, they are not surprising for most women like me who are harassed on a daily basis. Most of my days the harassment is minor - catcalls, jeers, elevator eyes, the feeling that a man is undressing you with his eyes - but some days it is not.

A couple weeks ago, I walking back from the bus stop down the road from my apartment in the late afternoon. Because of the heat, there were few people walking on the street. I looked up and saw a teenage boy riding his bicycle - in many countries not a cause for alarm. But then, just as he was about to pass me, his reached out his hand to try and touch my breast. Call it reflex or the product of being in similar situations so frequently, but I quickly smacked my bag into his hand before he could touch me. He laughed as he cycled away.

These kinds of incidents are commonplace. It would be difficult to find a woman in Egypt who does not have at least a couple similar stories. One of the bigger problems, is that a lot of women, especially Egyptian women, have stopped even recognizing harassment as harassment.

After watching a movie called 678, an Egyptian film chronicling harassment and issues related to it, I was discussing the ideas with my high school students. I asked the class if any of them had ever been harassed before. More than one girl answered, "well, just catcalls and stares, but that's really it." Now, these girls are only about 15 and for them to think that even something as harmless as catcalls is not harassment because it happens to them so often I think is very telling of the situation.

I really do feel that many of these mass brutal attacks on women in Tahrir are just the next stage in violence against women. There are two ways I think that people can start fighting for a solution. The first is that Egyptian women need to take a stand whenever they are a victim of harassment, because if they don't do that, they will remain victims. And the second, is that the harassment women talk about is not just the horrible and blood-curdling but the mundane daily instances that all of us women living in Egypt are subject to. Harassment in Egypt needs to be exposed for what it is: a systematic and entrenched part of daily culture that maims, shames, and degrades women.

egypt, middle+east, arab+spring, islam