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Actor, dressed as woman, feels Egypt's sexual harassment
un articulo por Maria Caspani, Thomson Reuters Foundation news service
Would men stop sexually harassing women, or at least
understand what it feels like to be verbally and
physically abused, if they were to experience it
themselves? One TV programme in Egypt has looked at
the issue of sexual harassment by doing just that.
A man wears high heels for the 10th annual Walk A Mile In Her Shoes to raise awareness against sexual violence in San Jose, California, on April 18, 2012. (c) REUTERS/Stephen Lam
click on photo to enlarge
“Awel el Khayt” - roughly translated as “The
Thread” - is a seven-episode series aimed at
covering longstanding socio-political and economic
problems in the north African country. A team of
17 staffers works on the programme - a co-
production between Belail Media Production and
Consulting and Egyptian TV network ONTV.
In a recently aired 30-minute episode titled
“Sexual Harassment in Egypt”, young actor Waleed
Hammad took to the streets of downtown Cairo
dressed as a woman in order to experience
harassment firsthand. In the report, Hammad - who
went out both veiled and unveiled to see whether
that would make a difference - said he was
followed by fancy cars with men in suits who would
try to lure him into the vehicle.
On another occasion, he was followed by a man who
seemed to be talking on the phone. The actor
realised after a while that the man was in fact
cautiously addressing him, proposing a paid
appointment with another man in a hotel room. “I
realised that simply walking on the street, for a
woman, is such a huge effort, a psychological
effort and a bodily effort. It’s like women are
besieged,” Hammad said.
“As a man (Hammad) takes to the streets to go
about his daily business without much thought for
what he is wearing, who is looking at him, and
without the fear of being physically or verbally
harassed,” Ramy Aly, the editorial consultant for
the programme told Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“So dressing up as a woman was a real eye opener,
an exercise in empathy.” Finding an actor willing
to put on women’s clothing and walk the streets of
Cairo wasn’t easy, Aly said.
Producers went to a number of casting agencies, but
most actors refused. It took them two months to find
Hammad.
Aly said the series is meant to fill a void in
current affairs programming on Egyptian
television, which has long been dominated by talk
shows and TV debates but lacks factual programming
formats. “We decided to go for a mixed format
where we would produce documentaries investigating
issues like sexual harassment, food security,
health care and education, which we would use as a
way of laying the ground for informed debate,” he
said. “We wanted try and tackle some of the
longstanding problems that Egypt faces in a
different way.”
Sexual harassment is an endemic, longstanding,
highly controversial and sensitive subject in Egypt.
A string of high-profile incidents of mass sex
attacks in recent months has drawn global attention
on the phenomenon.
[Note: Thank you to CPNN reporter Janet Hudgins, who obtained permission to reprint this article.]
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Sexual harassment is an endemic, longstanding,
highly controversial and sensitive subject in Egypt.
A string of high-profile incidents of mass sex
attacks in recent months has drawn global attention
on the phenomenon.
“However,” Aly said, “society has by and large
turned a blind eye to the everyday forms of sexual
harassment that millions of Egyptian women
experience every day on the street, public transport
and at work.”
Moreover, some men remain unsympathetic towards
women who have been harassed, blaming them for
dressing provocatively and calling the abuse upon
them.
According to Aly, the reasons of sexual harassment
are complex and include a number of stereotypes.
It is fueled by unemployment, poverty, lower
chances of marriage, the Internet, pornography and
women going beyond their traditional roles as
housewives and mothers.
However, none of the above provides an exhaustive,
comprehensive explanation of the phenomenon, he
said.
“We realised that we could not find a root cause,
and so instead, the film engages in a kind of
myth-busting exercise. (We found that) many
perpetrators are married, they are both wealthy
and poor men, and that women who are veiled in
various degrees from niqab (full veil) to hijab
(headscarf) are harassed in equal measure.”
They even came across a case in which a brother
accidentally harassed his own sister.
In addition to Hammad’s experiment, the TV programme
also gathered testimonies of women who were victims
of harassment. And, Aly said, it wasn’t easy getting
them to open up.
“It is still a challenge to find non-activist women
who are willing to speak candidly about their
experiences of sexual harassment because it is such
a social taboo.”
One woman who took her harasser to court and got him
convicted recounted being pressured to drop the
charges during the first court hearing, and
subsequently being threatened by his family, who
said they would throw acid on her face.
“Nobody supported me, and to this day, not many
people in my family know that I took him to court,
and those that do know say, ‘How will you get
married after what you have done?’” the woman said.
Hammad, after switching gender roles for the TV
programme, felt some empathy.
“I would say to all the women out there, God be
with you. I know that it is such a devastating
experience, and even as a man dressed as a woman,
I don’t think I can claim to really understand
what it feel like to be a woman under these
circumstances,” Hammad said.
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