Free Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy Page A

for the obstacle course of offensive words, gropinghands, and worse that awaits her in the streets she takes to school, university, and work. The same UN study also reported that about 96.5 percent of Egyptian women have experienced unwelcome physical contact, while 95.5 percent have been subjected to verbal harassment on the streets.
    In Yemen, the activist Amal Basha published a study asserting that 90 percent of Yemeni women have experienced harassment, specifically pinching. “The religious leaders are always blaming the women, making them live in a constant state of fear because out there, someone is following them,” Basha told the Associated Press. If a harassment case is reported in Yemen, Basha added, traditional leaders interfere to cover it up, remove the evidence, or terrorize the victim.
    It is worth noting that nearly all women in Yemen are covered from head to toe. I would never connect a woman’s outfit with any unwanted physical contact or verbal abuse, but our conservative societies do. The extraordinarily high incidence of harassment in Yemen gives the lie to the conservatives who claim women bring harassment on themselves by dressing “immodestly.”
    In Tunisia, largely considered more socially progressive than other countries in the region, laws do little to curb harassment, and the same cultural forces perpetuate it: a taboo against speaking out, an obsession with virginity, and victim blaming. Though Tunisia enacted a 2004 law against sexual harassment, activists complainthat it places the onus on women to prove that the harassment occurs on a regular basis. The law is also tainted with moralizing language that claims to discourage the “infringement of good mores and sexual harassment.”
    In Algeria, when the first workplace sexual harassment conviction was handed down, in 2012, the verdict was celebrated as an important message to Algerian women that they could seek justice. Yet the guilty party, a television executive in his seventies, was penalized with only a six-month suspended jail sentence and a 200,000 dinar fine—the equivalent of less than $3,000.
    These violations continue unchecked and unabated as our governments fail again and again to make serious efforts to protect girls and women in public space. Effective laws are not the only solution, but they would at least indicate a willingness on the part of government to take seriously any sexual violations against women. In countries where there are no statutes against street sexual harassment, let alone a proper definition of it that could help women who wanted to use the law against their harassers, women are further silenced through shame and taboo.
    Witness what happened when Rula Qawas, the dean of the School of Languages at the University of Jordan, assisted and advised a group of her students in her feminist theory course to make a short film about the sexual harassment experienced on the university’s campus. The film showed female students holding up signs that quotedthe verbal abuse they’d heard. After the film was posted on YouTube in June 2012, it sparked both controversy and condemnation, not against the men on campus whose sexual harassment had been exposed, but at the female students, whose film was accused of making the university look bad.
    The university president fired Qawas, to the anger of activists and academics alike. One group of academics, the Middle East Studies Association, condemned Qawas’s arbitrary dismissal and urged the university president to end the “systematic and unpunished sexual harassment of female students on the university campus.”
    Street sexual harassment is not exclusive to the Middle East and North Africa. It is a disturbing reality for too many women around the world. But a combination of societal, religious, and political factors has made the region’s public space uniquely dangerous for women.
    Activists at the first-ever regional conference on sexual harassment, which took place