The Street Is Not Ours

Been listening lately to "The Street is Ours" (Elshare3 Lena). Do you remember this song from Youssef Chahine's famous movie 3awdet el2ebn eldal? Then it occurred to me.. Actually the street isn't ours any more, and by "ours" I mean females. Can you imagine how a girl feels when she walks down the street? It is so weird, that the most public of places became the scariest. No, the street is not ours. We walk down the street as if we are crossing a lake of crocodiles. We speed up as much as we can, that sometimes you can't tell if a girl is walking or running. We expect a sudden attack by anyone, even young school boys who feel that saying a dirty word makes them men. That's because the culture of violence against women has become a horrifying fact in our daily life. It found its manifestation through sexual harassments which are practiced by many, and I mean many boys and men in the streets and means of public transportation.

The cultural shift that Egypt has gone through has unfortunately resulted in a lapse in society's consciousness and its view of women. Women became pounds of flesh walking on two feet. They are just bodies, a means for temptation, which need to be covered up from the eyes of men. But the same theory that was used to justify why we should suddenly all cover up (as if Islam is a discovery of the 21st century) had an opposite effect. Instead of protecting women from those hungry wolves (used to be called men), harassments became a common practice in our streets. We also went as far as witnessing massive harassment attacks during an Islamic feast! Many of the victims of those attacks were veiled girls. The wolves didn't differentiate between covered and uncovered meat. It's all flesh in the end.

The increasing violence against women that we witness nowadays is a result of the inferior position of females in our society. Women are looked down on in such a way which turned them into a means for pleasure. They are not fully human, but sub-humans, in a way which resembles the old ideas which slavery was based upon. Slaves in this context did not have any rights, because if God had cared for them He wouldn't have created them black. The whites at those times saw the slaves as a lesser species. They needed the white man to have a goal in life, that is serving this white man. The same applies to women nowadays, in a culture which stresses the body of the woman either but covering it all up, or over-showing it in indecent music videos which our Arabic channels are full of today.

Sexual harassment takes different shapes and methods. Not all of which has to be by a physical as most people think. Verbal harassment is the most common, cause it doesn't need the victim to be in direct contact with the attacker, it is fast, gives the chance for a quick escape, and the attacker doesn't have to plan it before hand. The verbal sexual attacker can easily turn into a physical sexual predator. But is this verbal harassement categorized as violence? Yes, it is. Because by merely dropping a sexual comment the attacker can not only hurt the feelings of his victim, but also makes her feel afraid and ashamed! It is a kind of terrorism, which makes a girl feel insecure and shaken by a mysterious guilt. It is a very strange thing that victims of sexual harassment bear those feelings of shame and guilt which an attacker ought to have instead. But the image that society keeps feeding up is that a girl is always guilty, even if she is the victim, cause she has the body, the source of temptation.

Our streets won't be safe again until we have the courage to face the problem and talk about it. This problem would never be solved unless a girl is welcomed again into the human species and received the respect she deserves from society.