doubly oppressed
Posted by hakawi on November 8, 2006
Several incidents are surfacing in the media these days – and in particular in Arab media, regarding violence against women and the sexual harassment of women. As Arab governments are battling to stay alive and maintain control, women are being - literally – trampled upon. It is as noted Egyptian columnist Salam Ahmed Salama writes:
“The police’s only job now is to protect a small minority of the political elite. It has completely abandoned its role of protecting the public.” [link]
The first incident is the now infamous downtown Cairo incident where several women have been attacked and groped and undressed during a movie premiere event. Amidst official governmental denials, bloggers who witnessed the events by pure coincidence, reported it and took pictures of it on their mobile phones. According to the Al Ahram Weekly, Professor of political sociology Saed Mostafa Sadek made an interesting correlation between these attacks and those made by State Security earlier this year against female journalists and women demonstrators:
when female journalists were sexually assaulted by plain-clothes security personnel during a demonstration to protest last year’s referendum on Article 76 of the constitution no one was prosecuted or held accountable. Such flagrant disregard for the rights of woman has, says Sadek, encouraged a culture of violence in the street of which women are often the target. It is fuelled, he believes, by the sexual frustration that many young men harbour. What we are seeing, he says, is a mixture of “desire and hatred”, desire for what they want and hatred at what they cannot have.
The second incident [which has also been reported on Sabbah's blog] is about a Saudi gang rape victim who has been sentenced to 90 lashes of the whip because she was alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married. The victim and her friend were followed by the assailants to their car, kidnapped and taken to a remote farm, where the raping occurred [link]. This ’male friend’ was also sentenced to 90 lashes for being alone with her in the car, and yet no mention was made that it so happens that the male friend was actually the man who came to her rescue… She was in the car with him as he rescued her, so they were both sentenced to 90 lashes each.
Say what now?
The last item here is from Palestine, and it is in a recent Human Rights Watch report based on interviews from 05 and 06. The report states that the legal and justice systems in the West Bank and Gaza result in light sentences for men who, claiming an affront to family honour, kill female relatives suspected of adultery. In addition, rapists who agree to marry their victims are exempted from criminal prosecution [a typical situation in most Arab countries]. There is nothing new in this report, except that there is also violence against women from the Israeli forces that was not mentioned in the report.
Are these signs of the disintegration of the State or is it business as usual for women in the Middle East? Or is it the usual ‘men are oppressed’ and they ‘take it out on women’ syndrome that has afflicted the Middle East for decades now, hence making women doubly oppressed?
