Egypt is No Place for Women

Every woman I know who has visited Egypt was sexually harrassed there over and over again. It’s relentless. It’s extremely aggressive and it never stops. Attractive women can’t go outside for even five minutes.

And I’ve lost track of how many stories like this I’ve read lately.

A young female journalist was gang-raped during violent mass protests in Egypt on a night that saw 44 sickening attacks on women.

Five men attacked the 22-year-old Dutch woman in Tahrir Square, Cairo, leaving her in a “severe condition” and needing surgery.

[R]eports also claimed a grandmother and a seven-year-old child were sexually assaulted.

[…]

Last night Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, tweeted: “Sadly #tahrir revolutionary atmosphere of people behaving well with common purpose long gone. Sexual assault common. No cops in sight.”

[…]

Activist group Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment recorded 44 cases of sexual assaults and harassment against women on Sunday night alone – the highest number it has encountered since the group formed in November 2012.

My wife has traveled with me to Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia, and Libya, and she visited Morocco with her parents when she was a teenager. She had to deal with a few minor incidents in Tunisia and Libya, but nothing worth writing about and nothing that would deter her from going back. (She was with me, though, which may have discouraged men from bothering her.) In Morocco she ran into a man who jokingly offered her father a dozen camels if he could marry her, and that was it. She had no trouble in Turkey or Lebanon. I don’t know any women who have trouble in Lebanon. Men there know how to behave.

I don’t know why Egypt is so much worse, but for whatever reason, it is. I will never take my wife there. Never. She would not go there anyway. She knows how bad it is, but a lot of women apparently don’t. That needs to change.