Like many activists, I was happy with the recent verdicts against the groups of male offenders charged with raping and sexually assaulting women in Cairo’s streets. The rulings, which served up life sentences and long prison terms to the instigators of three separate incidents, are an improvement in the justice system’s troubling approach to violent crimes against women. However, they fall short of addressing the overall systemic problem, which begins with everyday verbal harassment and escalates into gang rapes in the middle of city squares.
Like many activists, I was happy with the recent verdicts against the groups of male offenders charged with raping and sexually assaulting women in Cairo’s streets. The rulings, which served up life sentences and long prison terms to the instigators of three separate incidents, are an improvement in the justice system’s troubling approach to violent crimes against women. However, they fall short of addressing the overall systemic problem, which begins with everyday verbal harassment and escalates into gang rapes in the middle of city squares.
Such crimes, committed by Egyptians against their fellow citizens—often in broad daylight—have increased in intensity and frequency during the revolution years, but are not altogether new.
The first highly publicized example, notorious among my generation is the 1992 case of the “Atba girl,” in which a group of youth aged 7-11 assaulted a 21-year-old woman on a bus. At the time, the media was less concerned with the guilt of the two males arrested at the scene than with the issue of the victim’s virginity and whether she lost it as a result of the incident, as she claimed.
The issue was widely discussed in Parliament and other state institutions, and eventually resulted in the defendants’ acquittal. ‘Is it acceptable to publicly gang rape a woman if her hymen isn’t intact?’ I recall asking myself this question as I entered adolescence.
Such instances of rape are not the only types of sexually motivated crimes that need attention in our society. Domestic violence, workplace harassment and the abuse of female prisoners are no less prevalent and contemptible. However, cases where the offense is public and collective have more immediate social impact and require special attention by state and legal bodies, from the minute investigators arrive at the crime scene to the moment the case leaves a judge’s desk.
These cases require concentrated efforts by various state organs, which should focus on rehabilitation as well as retribution. In the past, the efforts of female sexual abuse victims who sought justice through legal channels fell on deaf ears. This happened, for example, in the case of the female demonstrators sexually assaulted by a group of pro-government thugs during public protests against the constitutional amendments of 2005. Police rarely arrested anyone for such crimes. Even if they did, they failed to gather enough evidence to convict the suspects, as was the case in an infamous gang rape committed in central Cairo during the Eid al-Fitr holiday in 2006.
Hence the importance of the recent rulings. Although many similar incidents occurred in the vicinity of Tahrir Square from the summer of 2011 until five days before the famous inauguration day June 3, no previous case reached a similar stage of litigation. For the first time, state and media refrained from wrangles over the veracity of the victims’ statements, mainly because the crime was documented on a video seen by millions of Internet users. For the first time, the state apparatus did not focus on discrediting victims, nor were the rapes used as a political weapon against anti-government protesters.
For the first time, we have not been tussling over common sense facts or demanding justice in vain. Community involvement and political will has made a great difference. In previous incidents since the beginning of the revolution, the government was either completely absent from the discussion or used it for its own gain. Civil society focused its efforts on helping the survivors, whose chances of achieving justice on their own would have been much more limited.
Let us recall the case of the Atba girl, in which mishandled evidence turned the trial in the defense’s favor because one of the defendants suffered from a physical disability. This time, the police officers who intervened at the scene gave clear evidence against the defense. The prosecution played its role by presenting the felons to the survivors more than once for identification and comparing the defendants’ faces with the videos. The forensics unit prepared medical reports without indulging in skeptical questions about the honor of the female survivors. Finally, the judge was keen to maximize the punishment by indicting the defendants on all possible charges.
Although the defendants still have the right to appeal, the verdicts represent an important development in curbing the surge of violent sexual crimes committed against women in public spaces. The timing of the verdicts tempers this enthusiasm, however, since the state has a direct interest in preventing anarchy and sending the message that this era is not like the others; the time of chaos has ended, and the victims of these rapes are viewed as rehabilitated citizens rather than enemies to be mutilated and publically shamed. No existing political forces, whether pro-government or opposition, have an interest in denying the events.
Nevertheless, the verdicts are not a guarantee of systematic change. In the surrounding discourse, the cases have been treated as unique and unprecedented, as though public rapes had never happened before. A comprehensive strategy to address violence against women has yet to be issued, and existing reforms are still fragmented and random. Some police departments have a unit for combating violence against women while others do not, hospitals lack special units to treat sexual assault victims and forensic doctors are still more likely to inspect a victim’s virginity than look for traces of rape. The state continues to show enmity towards the civic movement against sexual violence, dodging its obligation to develop a strategy to help security forces deal with such crimes.
The state should spread a culture of respect for women’s physical integrity and right to safely exist within the public domain. Comprehensive legislation on sexual violence, which feminist organizations have long advocated, is still in its infancy. Until today, no formal report on the sexual assaults in or near Tahrir Square has been issued.
Abuses against women held in detention centers have not been investigated. If such inaction continues, the government will again be in danger of sending out the troubling message that in Egypt, there are certain crimes that go unpunished.
