HarassMap
Background:
Sexual
harassment and assault in Egypt has reached epidemic proportions. According to
HarassMap’s 2014 study, 97 per cent of women participating in the study have
experienced sexual harassment. A UN WOMEN study from 2013 puts the number at
99,3 per cent.
HarassMap, a volunteer-based initiative, was
launched in December 2010 by four co-founders, volunteers, and tech partners in
response to the sexual harassment that society had become increasingly tolerant
towards and no one else was willing to address at the level of the community.
Objective:
HarassMap’s mission is to end the social acceptability
of sexual harassment and assault in Egypt.
Main activities:
We are also currently working on a pilot of a larger
project to expand our community mobilization
activities and transform public space in Egypt by creating physical spaces in
communities that are committed to enforcing a sexual harassment zero-tolerance
policy. Our partners will be shown as role models in a big campaign to generate
a movement that motivates all of society to get active against sexual
harassment in a tangible, practical way.
Methodology:
Our work is based on the idea that a critical mass of
people who change their behaviour can bring about larger normative behaviour
change in the whole society. We therefore work to achieve our mission to create
a critical mass of people by convincing bystanders to stand up to sexual
harassment or assault before or when they see it happen. This way, by taking a
collective stand against sexual harassment and assault, we as a society can
create social and legal consequences that discourage harassing behaviour and
seriously reduce it.
Partners:
Our technical partners, who help us with our reporting
system and online map, include Ushahidi and Megakheir. We also partner with
other initiatives working on the issue of sexual harassment (Anti Harassment
Movement, Nazra for Feminist Studies, El Nadeem Center, Mashrou3 EL Mareekh,
and many others) to create joint campaigns, workshops, and community
activities.
Achieved results:
·
We have 40 community captains who
mobilize about 1500 volunteers in 18 governorates to go into their own
communities’’ streets to convince bystanders to stand up to sexual harassment.
These captains have also begun to expand their activities into the smaller
villages in their governorates.
·
Professors at Cairo University are
adopting our anti- sexual harassment policy for implementation at the
university and will lobby for its adoption at all universities in Egypt.
·
Anecdote
from our community work : In 2012 our community mobilization volunteers
recruited a street kiosk as our first pilot Safe Area partner. The area around
the kiosk is one of this neighbourhood’s sexual harassment hot spots, where
large groups of male youth spend their free time in the street and holler at
every woman who passes by. The kiosk owner is passionate about the cause and
readily agreed to work with us and to prevent, stop and report harassment
whenever he witnesses it. In early 2013 a HarassMap volunteer passed by this
street while she was filming footage for a video on this topic. She got
harassed and physically attacked by a group of young men who insulted and tried
to kick her. With the help of the kiosk’s owner she managed to take one of the
men with her to a police station (the harasser’s presence being a precondition
for filing a report) where the case was eventually settled with an apology and
the harasser’s pledge to not only never harass again but to convince his peers
to follow his example. HarassMap widely publicised this incident and its
successful escalation and soon after a police car was deployed to this area on
weekend nights. Even more importantly people living in this neighbourhood
organized themselves informally and started patrolling this area’s streets to
make them safer for everyone. In April 2013 a young woman passed by this street
and got verbally harassed by an older man who also followed her. This caught
the attention of the caretaker of a fast food chain restaurant located close to
our Safe Area kiosk. The caretaker called the police who came by car and took
the man into custody. The kiosk’s manager reported this story to us and the
caretaker, asked why he had intervened, replied reflecting HarassMap’s
philosophy: ‘Because this is a Safe Area, sexual harassment is not accepted
here!’
·
Research results and experiences from our work
on the ground are showing positive perception change: People have started to
understand sexual harassment as also verbal, not only physical harassment, and
more and more people (contrary to before) believe that sexual harassment is not
related to women’s clothes.
·
Discovering the truth
about sexual harassment: When we started collecting reports, we discovered from
the data that all of the myths and stereotypes about the issue were being proven
wrong, even stereotypes we ourselves had. Some of the things that HarassMap
data (more than 1500 crowdsourced reports of sexual harassment) is the first to
document include:
o
There is no link to
socio-economic background or marital status - harassers are young and old, big
business owners and street vendors, married and unmarried. Delayed marriage,
one of the most common reasons given for sexual harassment, isn’t really
the problem. Poverty or lack of education isn’t either.
o
Many harassers are
children and have not reached the age of puberty so sexual frustration, another
common reason or excuse for sexual harassment, isn’t the problem either.
o
The age or dress or
actions of the harassed matter and our reports and research show that some
women experience getting harassed more after dressing more conservatively.
o
Sexual harassment
happens at all times of day, even 7 or 8 am is not uncommon, and it can be
verbal or physical, and includes gesturing, following, indecent exposure etc.
o
Sexual harassment happens
everywhere. We have reports of sexual harassment from rural and urban areas all
over Egypt so urbanization and overcrowding is not the reason.
o
Also men and boys are
being sexually harassed.
(These,
and other research findings, can be found in our newly published report Towards a Safer City – Sexual harassment in
Greater Cairo: The effectiveness of crowdsourced data that can be found on
our website.)
·
Our ‘Debunking
Myths’ campaign has over the past year become one of the
most well known anti-sexual harassment ‘slogans’ and the messages and content
of the campaign are being used, shared, and even re-published by leading TV
channels, other social initiatives, and popular YouTube personalities.
·
Our ‘Mesh Sakta’
campaign gathered hundreds of stories from women who have started to stand up
to sexual harassment that happened to them or to others, the campaign material
(consisting of tips for how you can stand up to sexual harassment) can be found
all over Cairo neighbourhoods. The campaign hashtag was trending in Egypt
during the peak of the campaign, and is still one of the main hashtags being
used in discussions on sexual harassment/assault in Egypt.
·
Since our launch we have supported at least 28
other HarassMap-inspired initiatives to launch outside of Egypt.
Sustainability
We
train our community captains with TOT trainings with the goal of cultivating
independent local leadership. We also provide all of our information, lessons
learned, campaigns, and research as open source for others to utilize.
Strength:
·
Our team is made up of some of the
people with the longest experience working on this issue in Egypt.
·
Our methods and activities are
based on our experience in the field and targeted to meet specific needs in the
relevant context. We have a coherent theory of change that all our activities
are grounded in. We focus strongly on testing our methods and evaluating their
impact, altering them in response to feedback and lessons learned.
Challenges:
·
Timely and professional expertize to deal with
technical issues arising with our map/reporting system is sometimes difficult to
find in Egypt and this sometimes slows down our work and limits our capacity to
expand and develop this part of our activities.
·
The political instability has also sometimes
created security concerns and a certain sense of unpredictability to our
activities on the ground all around Egypt and we sometimes have had to cancel
or reorganize planned activities.
Note:
It should be mentioned that on June 4(2014), a
new law was approved, criminalizing sexual harassment for the first time in modern Egyptian history.
The new law is the result of persistent efforts of women’s organisations and
working groups. Although not all of the advice coming from the organisations
has been taken into account, sexual harassment is finally considered a crime in
Egypt and perpetrators might now face penalties, such as long jail terms and
high fines.
Condensed from an
article published in June 6, 2014 in “The Guardian”
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 has 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."
More information:
