Egypt: Innovation to Help Curb Sexual harassment of Women

By Eric Sande

Cairo, Egypt---The subject of giving compliments and uttering flirtatious remarks to women in Egypt is appalling and has taken a serious turn of events. “HarassMap” a tracking system that allows a person to send signal via the mobile is set to be launched later this year. This system allows for women to instantly report incidents of sexual harassment by sending a text message to a dedicated server computer.

The victims will instantly get a reply offering support and practical advice. The upsurge collected for the text messages reports will be used to  a detailed and publicly available map of harassment hotspots.

A survey carried out by Egypt's Centre for Women's Rights, depicted 83 per cent of the 2,800 women polled stating that they had been subjected to some form of sexual harassment. Nihad abul Khomsan the centre's chairwoman,  said the survey ''shocked us.'' She said that ''most of the women who were harassed were veiled, so there is no relation with the type of dress you have.''

In divergence to popular opinion, sexual harassment incidents do not appear to be linked to the woman's style of dress, with three-quarters of victims having been veiled at the time. But efforts to curb the problem have met with opposition.

The system was divulged in the battle against sexual harassment in Egypt, where just about half the female population faces undesirable attention from men day after day. It  utilises an open-source mapping technology more usually connected with humanitarian relief operations.

Activists behind this technology are optimistic to transform social postures to the molestation of women and shame authorities into taking greater action to combat the problem.

Rebecca Chiao, one of the volunteers behind the project said,"In the last couple of years there's been a debate in Egypt over whether harassment of women on the streets is a serious issue, or whether it's something women are making up.So HarassMap will have an impact on the ground by revealing the extent of this problem. It will also offer victims a practical way of responding, something to fight back with; as someone who has experienced sexual harassment personally on the streets of Cairo, I know that the most frustrating part of it was feeling like there was nothing I could do."

Egypt's statute books currently hold no direction to deal with sexual harassment although a number of draft laws are under contemplation by the parliament. Two year s ago, immediately weeks after a sequence of sexual assaults flawed a public holiday, Egypt's first lady, Suzanne Mubarak, accused the media of overdoing the threat posed by sexual harassment, and concerns about tarnishing the country's image have continued to stifle debate on the subject.