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Taharrush jamaʿi (Template:Lang-ar taḥarrush jamāʿī, lit. "collective harassment"; Egyptian pronunciation taḥarrush gamāʿī) is a type of sexual assault of women by large groups of men on the street. The term was transliterated as taharrush gamea by the Western media in 2016 following a German government report. The assaults can involve digital penetration of the vagina and anus, beating, biting, cutting the women's clothes off, groping, rape and robbery. They usually occur under the protective cover of large gatherings, typically protests, concerts and public festivals, and can involve hundreds of men assaulting one or two women. Women in Egypt have called it the "circle of hell." Parallels have been drawn with Eve teasing, and with the harrassment of women and couples during the Puerto Rican Day Parade attacks in 2000.

The term taharrush and combinations such as taḥarrush el-ginsy (Template:Lang-ar), both of which can refer to the sexual harassment of women in public, have played a controversial role in Egypt since the political turmoil of the 2000s. Egyptian security forces were blamed early on for using sexual harassment as a weapon against female participants at demonstrations. The behavior spread and was used by crowds of young men to harass women in public spaces. According to Farhana Mayer, senior researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, taharrush is a symptom of a misogynous ideology in which women are punished for being in public.

Terminology

Before 2006 the term taḥarrush referred mainly to the sexual abuse of children. During the Egyptian constitutional referendum in 2005, women reported being sexually harassed and assaulted by police and agents provocateurs (baltigiyya) during demonstrations, in what became known as "Black Wednesday." Al-Nabā News referred to the attacks as taharrush and htk'ird (rape).

On the Eid al-Fitr holiday in Cairo in October 2006, a crowd of young men who had been denied entrance to a cinema began a mass sexual assault of women in the street. After that incident, taharrush or taharrush al-ginsy came to refer specifically to sexual harassment in public places.

The phenomenon gained prominence outside the country in February 2011 when Lara Logan, a reporter for the American network CBS, was sexually assaulted and beaten by hundreds of men in Tahrir Square, Cairo, while reporting on the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

The term taḥarrush came to widespread attention in 2016 after women in several German cities, particularly Cologne, reported that they had been sexually assaulted by large groups of Arab or North African men during New Year's Eve celebrations. The German Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Crime Office) called it taharrush gamea in an internal report after a conference with the various Länder police forces. An article about the report in Die Welt on 10 January 2016 made international news.

Prevalence

Overview

The Institute of Development Studies (IDS), a research charity affiliated with the University of Sussex, has called for research into politically motivated sexual assault in times of political change. It proposes country studies in, for example, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen.

Parallels have been drawn with Eve teasing, and with the mob of youngsters that harrassed women and couples during the Puerto Rican Day Parade attacks in 2000.

Egypt

In 2008 a local movie maker, Noha Rushdie, was the first woman to win a court case against a molester. Movies have some importance as a medium, because they allow the depiction of current events and topics that will be understood by viewers in Egypt who are unable to read. Ihkî yâ Shahrâzâd (Les Filles du Caire, from Yusrî Nasr Allâh, in 2009) and 678 (Arabic: فيلم ٦٧٨ - feelm sitta seba' thamaniyya) in 2010 were among the first to show taharrush in Egypt in cinemas.

Mass assault,
Cairo, Eid al-Adha, January 2006.
(The women are visible from c. 0:32 mins.)

678 (the number of a bus line) caused some controversies in Egypt but got an award at the 2010 Dubai International Film Festival and has been published in various countries (e.g. 2012 as Kairo 678 in Germany). It depicts three women of various backgrounds: the first uses a knife to defend herself against attacks, the second is being harassed in a group in the presence of her husband, who is not able to help her. Her marriage fails afterwards. The third one activates a group of people to help her against a single molester. While her filing of a report to the police is being blocked by officers, she is invited to appear on a TV show, as she was the first Egyptian woman to file a report for harassment.

The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 saw the use of sexual harassment as a means of denying women access to public spaces and rallies. It also saw the growth of a counter-movement by NGOs and women's organizations.

Some taharrush-related incidents made national news in Egypt and gained notoriety on social networks. After 9 March 2011, a day after International Women's Day, some feminist activists arrested during a rally on Tahrir Square were forced to have their virginity inspected. Mobile phone videos like the Blue Bra or Tahrir Girl, (Sit al Banat in Arab), an unknown woman covered in an abaya and undressed in Cairo, went viral. The phenomenon first came to the attention of Western media in 2011 when CBS correspondent Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by around 200 men in Cairo's Tahrir Square during her reporting of the Egyptian revolution. Logan was rescued from the attack, which lasted about 30 minutes, by a group of Eygptian women and soldiers.

During the period of the Mohammed Mursi government, the incidents became even more violent. On the eve of the second anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, on 25 January 2013, a gathering of women survivors of such treatment met at Cafe Riche (Talaat Harb close to Tahrir square) and decided to start a larger political initiative. They gained support from a variety of NGOs and political parties against the use of sexual harassment by the police forces. Lamis El Hadidy, a TV anchorwoman and political analyst, used the topic in a TV transmission in February 2013.

A first attempt to change the penal law, supported e.g. by Amr Hamzawy failed. The ruling party held women participating in public rallies personally responsible for such incidents. In March 2013 the Muslim Brotherhood provided a strongly worded statement against the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women as a danger for Egyptian cultural norms and society. The massive participation of women in the public rallies was one of the reasons for the controversies.

After an incident in 2014, when a woman at the Cairo University College of Law was harassed by a large group of men and had to be escorted to safety by the police, the Egyptian penal code was changed.

Europe

Pointing out that European cultures lack a word for taharrush gamea, Josef Joffe, publisher-editor of Die Zeit, defined it in January 2016 as: "a group-grope where young men encircle women to jeer, molest and rob them," and argued that the "acculturation (of immigrants) into the strict sex codes of the West takes years."

Taharrush gamea was first widely reported in Europe after it took place in Cologne and other German cities during New Year's Eve celebrations in 2016. Group attacks were reported in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart. Up to 1,000 men were said to have surrounded women outside Cologne's main train station. By 18 January 2016, 838 people in Germany had complained to police; these included 497 women who alleged sexual assault, three of which were rapes. Women made similar complaints in Kalmar, Sweden; Salzburg, Austria; Zurich, Switzerland; and Helsinki, Finland.

In Germany a North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Justice report to the parliamentary committee of the Interior described taharrush gamea as a form of group sexual harassment that takes place in crowds. The report compared the 2016 New Year's Eve sexual assaults to incidents in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The perpetrators were said to have been "almost exclusively" "North African and Arab" recent arrivals. One difference between the Tahrir Square and German attacks is that the former took place during a political rally and some of the Cairo attacks may have been state-sanctioned.

In Finland staff at asylum centres told Helsinki police of plans for taharrush attacks in Helsinki during New Year' Eve celebrations in 2016. A crowd of about 20,000, including around Iraqi 1,000 refugees, gathered around the city's main train station and Senate Square. The police were present with a massive force and arranged for preliminary arrests of several refugees. Women complained that asylum seekers kissed them, licked their faces, squeezed them and groped their breasts. Police received complaints about one rape, two attempted rapes, and 12 cases of sexual harassment by groups of 10–20 men.

See also

• HARASSmap
• Operation Anti Sexual Harassment
• Rape culture
• Sex gangs
• We Are Sthlm sexual assaults
• 678 (film)

Notes

1. BBC News, January 2016: "The report describes a modus operandi known as "taharrush gamea" in Arabic, meaning group sexual harassment in crowds, and compares it to incidents reported in Cairo's Tahrir Square at the time of the Egyptian revolution."
2. Yasmine Fathi, Al-Ahram, 2013: "During the attacks , the women often find themselves trapped inside what some have called 'the circle of hell,' a mob of 200 or 300 men who fought with one another to pull, shove, beat and strip them.

References

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4. Fathi, Yasmine (21 February 2013). "The circle of hell: Inside Tahrir's mob sexual assault epidemic", Al-Ahram.
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7. Mayer, Farhana (14 January 2016). "The Sexual Attacks on Women in Europe Reflect a Misogynistic Mind-Set That Must Be Dismantled". The New York Times.
8. Fernandez, Sandra A. Fernandez (2015). "Male voices in a Cairo social movement", Égypte/Monde arabe, 13, citing Kreil, Aymon (2012). "Du rapport au dire: sexe, amour et discours d’expertise au Caire", doctoral thesis, EHESS/University of Neuchatel.
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22. Tadros, Mariz (2014). Reclaiming the Streets for Women’s Dignity: Effective Initiatives in the Struggle Against Gender-Based Violence in Between Egypt’s Two Revolutions. Institute of Development Studies with the University of Sussex. IDS Evidence Report 48. quoted at Abdelmonem 2015b harvnb error: no target: CITEREFAbdelmonem2015b (help) Pdf.
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24. Nowaira, Amira (18 March 2013). "The Muslim Brotherhood has shown its contempt for Egypt's women". The Guardian.
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27. ^ "How widespread were New Year's Eve assaults?", BBC News, 16 January 2011.
28. "Cologne attacks: first arrest over New Year's Eve sex assaults ", The Guardian, 18 January 2016.
29. "Helsinki police report 15 sexual harassment cases on New Year's Eve", The Daily Telegraph, 19 January 2016. Richard Orange, "Unprecedented sex harassment in Helsinki at New Year, Finnish police report", The Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2016.

    dpa (8 January 2016). "Sex-Übergriffe an Silvester auch in Finnland" [Sex-attacks on New Year's Eve in Finland, too]. Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine (in German).

• Arabic words and phrases
• Sexual harassment
• Crimes related to the European migrant crisis