Egypt’s women face growing sexual harassment
Reporting from Cairo —
On the night Hosni Mubarak fell from power, the crowds that rejoiced in Cairo’s central square were so dense, so roiling and rowdy, that Mohamed Assyouti couldn’t push his way through when his girlfriend, Mariam Nekiwi, was assaulted several yards away.
“A group of men surrounded her from four directions and closed her off,” he said.
First someone grabbed her groin, she said. Other hands groped the rest of her body, pinching hard and yanking at her clothes. She was shoved one way and then the other. The frenzy was so sudden, the crush so stifling, that she could barely see. She shouted, and then screamed. The reaction was swift.
“People started yelling at me to be quiet,” recalled Nekiwi, a 24-year-old video editor, still shaken by the ordeal. “They said: ‘Don’t tarnish the revolution. Don’t make a scene.’ They said: ‘We are men. We’re sorry. Just go now.’ “
Later that night, Feb. 11, CBS News correspondent Lara Logan came under what the network later described as a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating by a mob of unidentified men in another part of Tahrir Square.
Logan’s clothes were ripped off and her body was covered with welts and bruises, sources here said, before soldiers came to her rescue, firing live rounds in the air to disperse the attackers. She was evacuated to the U.S. and hospitalized for several days.