Sexual harassment in Egypt... and all over the World

The alert on sexual harassment in Egypt started in the fall of last year when the BBC pointed it out (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19440656). Everyday women are exposed to every kind of abuse in public and many of them are understandably afraid of going out even if is just for a walk. A study of 2008 reported that the 80% of women in Egypt experienced sexual harassment once at least in their lives. Unfortunately, this shocking data hasn’t changed.

If possible, now the situation is even worse after the unhappy case of the Minister of Information Salah Abdel Maqsoud that sexually harassed the journalist Nada Mohamed during an event at the University of Cairo (http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/04/14/minister-of-information-sexually-harasses-reporter/).

This last case is a blatant example of the bad and distorted image that women have in our society

. Only in few lucky cases women are considered as brilliant professionals and inspiring people to be taken seriously. In the majority of cases women are just seen like bodies or even objects.

Obviously this is not happening only in Egypt, but all over the World in different ways.

Sometimes this produce the worst effect possible, and an example on what I’m saying is the horrible practice of breast ironing in Cameroon. In February on the current year, the Cameroonian journalist Chi Yvonne Leina reported her story to UN Women entity (http://www.unwomen.org/2013/02/how-i-stopped-grandma-from-ironing-my-budding-breasts/). Many times breast ironing is aimed at protecting young women from worse form of harassment, but the effects on the life of the unlucky women that experienced that are crushing. It’s just another example of how our society (bad) consider women.

Agnese Cigliano